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THE 



EVOLUTION OF MAN 

AND 

HIS MIND. 



A HISTORY AND DISCUSSION OF THE EVOLUTION AND 

RELATION OF THE MIND AND BODY OF 

MAN AND ANIMALS. 



f 

BY S. V. CLEVENGER, M. D. 

Author of The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity, 1898— Spinal Concussion, 
1889— Comparative Physiology and Pyschology, 1S85 — A Treatise on 
the Method of Government Surveying, 1874. Formerly 
Pathologist of the Chicago County Insane Asy- 
lum and Medical Superintendent of the 
Illinois Eastern Hospital for the 
Insane, Etc., Etc. 



CHICAGO. 

EVOLUTION PUBLISHING COMPANY. 

70 State Street. 

1903. 



\\ 



^ 



THE LIBRARY OF" 

CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

MAR 2 1903 

Copyright Entry 
VSS CL. XXc. No 
COPY B. 



uop 



Copyright 1902 by Shobal V. Clevenger. 
Copyright 1902 by the Evolution Publishing Co. 



Press of 
GEO. K, HAZLITT & CO. 

Chicago. 



PREFACE. 

While a civil engineer and government surveyor of public 
lands the author became familiar with the workings of the land 
and Indian bureaus of the interior department in Washington, 
D. C, and incidentally the other offices of general, state and 
territorial control, and realizing the impossibility of doing con- 
scientious work while associated with the politicians who filled 
most of the places, in 1873 the field of medicine was substituted, 
and after graduation a specialty was made of nervous and mental 
disease. In order to further such studies the author secured a 
position as pathologist to the Chicago County Insane Asylum, 
and during three years' service there and later as superintendent 
of the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane he discovered that 
the politics controlling such places was inexpressibly worse than 
what he found elsewhere. As reform endeavors availed nothing, 
a determination was made to discover the reasons for the too fre- 
quent brutalities in public charity institutions, and the apathy of 
citizens concerning them. The studies expanded into this vol- 
ume, passing far beyond their original bounds, but rigidly con- 
fined to this world, with only incidental mention of anything be- 
yond ; though by inference the earth is but a small portion of the 
universe. 

Hallam, in the preface to his Literature of Europe, remarks 
that : "An author who waits till all requisite materials are ac- 
cumulated to his hands is but watching the stream that will run 
on forever and though I am fully sensible that I could have much 
improved what is now offered to the public by keeping it back 



IV PREFACE. 

for a longer time, I should but then have had to lament the im- 
possibility of exhausting my subject." 

The author finds encouragement in thinking with Carlyle, 
that : "If a book come from the heart it will contrive to reach 
other hearts. All art and author-craft are of small account to 
this." 

70 State St., Chicago, February, 1903. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I.— Earliest Man. 
Successive glances are taken at the conditions of our immediate and re- 
mote and then still remoter ancestry, until we reach savages in the ice ages. 
Frankland's theory of a hot primeval sea and Le Conte's critical periods in 
the course of the earth's development afford some of the bases upon which 
are gradually built up the earliest races of men, those of the stone age, 
the dwarfs, the Turanians, Africans, Malays, etc. The non-Aryans and 
pre-Aryans. The bronze and iron ages, the hunting, pastoral and farming 
stages of race progress. The separate origin of the different races, their 
migrations and subsequent intermixture; early civilization in America be- 
ing regarded as indigenous. 

CHAPTER II.— The Aryans. 

The primitive Himalaya range, the "Roof of the World." from which 
flows the Oxus river along which was located the legendary Aryan para- 
dise whence the Aryan settlers were driven by floods, droughts, savages 
and sand storms, migrating as Celts, Greek-Romans. Teutons and Slavs, 
from whom came the present German, French, English. Irish, Russian and 
Scandinavian peoples, as well as the Persians and high caste Hindoos. 

The growth, decline and extinction of tribes and nations, with the rise 
of new social organizations under various nanus. 

CHAPTER III.— The Semites. 
Babylonian civilization ten thousand years ago, Hilprecht's excavations 
in the Mesopotamian valley, royal and mercantile libraries being unearthed 
and translated which were written ages before the days of Abraham. The 
Hebrews, Assyrians, Phoenicians and Egyptians and what Europe owes to 
them. The Aryan barbarians deriving their alphabet, numerals and rudi- 
ments of arts and sciences from the Semites. 

CHAPTER IV.— Middle Ages. 
The behavior of a wilderness full of apes compared with the gluttony, 
rapacity and cruelty of the classical periods. Slow evolution of ideas while 
Rome was "governed" by rulers who were often insane, knaves and fools. 
A survey of the period from Commodus to Constantine during which sol- 
diers elected and murdered emperors. The rise of Charlemagne and the 
Franks when Germanic civilization grew upon the ruins of Roman power. 
Monasteries good and bad, and schools and the growth of ideas of free- 
dom in the Feudal periods and during the crusades. The escape of Eng- 

v 



VI TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

land through Magna Charta and the inheritance by America of Germanic 
ideas of freedom preserved in England through the barons finding it to 
their interests to join with the people against the king. 

French miseries, Joan of Arc, the Gabelle, the Bastille, etc. The loss 
by Germany through Romish corruption of the ideas of freedom it gave 
originally to the world. 

CHAPTER V.— Evolution. 
Formation of plants and animals from the elements, development of the 
lowest animals into birds, apes and men. Pithecanthropus, the missing 
link found in Java. The American horse and other exterminated species. 
Birds with lizard ancestors ; man-like-apes and ape-like-men. The various 
mountain centres of primitive races ; capped with ice these ranges pro- 
truded from a hot sea. Natural and sexual selection which with labor di- 
vision built up the present conditions about us. 

CHAPTER VI. — Heredity and Degeneracy. 
Ancestral pride is not justified in going very far back. Racial pecu- 
liarities. Specialized animals with generalized ancestors. Effects of con- 
sanguine and early marriages. Aryan features in children. Chemistry 
of heredity. Royal and other degenerates. 

CHAPTER VIL—Superstition, 

The superstitions of animals, children and savages. Ceremonies of 
dogs and monkeys. The worship of animals by the ancients ; the mytho- 
logical folk lore when analyzed affording accounts of early races. Super- 
stitious beliefs and worship have a natural history, and cruelty has been 
associated with religions from earliest periods ; the gradual culmination 
of old religions in the modern ethical, and the slow improvement and 
purification of extant ideas of omnipotence. 

CHAPTER VIII. — Evolution of Language and Writing. 

How birds, monkeys and other animals talk and what they say. The 
development of music with other means of emotional expression. Speech 
derangements from brain troubles. Dialects may grow into languages 
and if fittest to survive may be perpetuated though modified. Max Miiller 
on the origin of languages, and the few and simple Aryan roots from which 
European languages evolved. Ideas independent of words. 

The early pictographic or sketch writings of savages, the hieroglyphs 
and other symbolic writings, the Babylonian, Egyptian and other character 
writing from which descended our alphabet and numerals, which are still 
imperfect ; history of books and origin of family names. 

The speech centre in the brain and its gradual development and associa- 
tion with other brain parts. 

CHAPTER IX.— Hunger and Love. 
The derivation of the mating faculty from primitive hunger; relation 
of assimilation and propagation, the seasons and battles of mating, the 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. Vll 

courtship of birds, fishes, insects and other animals, the universality of 
music in courtship of man and animals. Chaperonage ; woman as prop- 
erty in civilized countries and as a tyrant in some barbarous countries 
where each female is entitled to several husbands. The delusions of love ; 
primary ancestral attraction, the chemistry and biology of love, natural 
and unnatural affections, perversions, inversions and arrests of develop- 
ment of the propensity. 

CHAPTER X.— Acquisitiveness. 

The origin of selfishness traced to its chemical source as an unavoidable 
and necessary attribute of all life and of even the atoms from which life 
develops. Altruism being merely a higher developed and more rational 
selfishness. 

CHAPTER XI.— Development of the Mind. 

Mental traits of the infant, youth and adult in their relations to brain 
development. 

CHAPTER XII— Evolution of the Brain. 

An account of the results of modern research in brain function by 
which has been disclosed that separate parts of the body are governed by 
special centres in the brain, and that between the lowest animal and the 
highest may be traced a gradual development of brain parts and structure 
in keeping with increase of intelligence. 

The relations of brain and mind. 

CHAPTER XIII.— The Senses and Feelings. 
Development of the senses of touch, hearing, smell and taste and their 
relation to pain and pleasure. 

CHAPTER XIV. — The Instincts and Emotions. 
Among desires in general the inborn instinct to move about is primary. 
The desire for rest impelling to sleep also properly regarded enables such 
important functions as bodily movements and sleep to be discussed from 
new vantage ground. The potent instincts of fear, courage, anger, re- 
venge, cruelty, curiosity, imitation, dishonesty and even the developed in- 
stinct of honesty are capable of being analyzed as animal phenomena and 
followed out from their beginnings in the lower forms of life. The cre- 
ation of habits that may descend to offspring is described as a factor in 
heredity and in the revolution of individuals and nations. 

CHAPTER XV.— The Intellectual Faculties. 
Under this division some of the matters treated are reason, judgment, 
intuition, memory, imagination, association, the generalizing ability, logic 
natural and artificial, and the will power. 

CHAPTER XVI.— Mental Diseases. 
Causes of insanity. Deformities of the brain, blood supply defects to 
brain. Delusions, hallucinations and illusions explained. 



Vlll TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XVII.— Character. 

The influence of natural selection and survival of the fittest, the effects 
of education and the bearings of physiognomy and allied matters are 
studied to enable a better comprehension and appreciation of the complex 
nature of man. National traits are assigned to special causes, also. 

CHAPTER XVIII.—Sociology. 

The changes made in history of peoples by wars, plagues, slavery, edu- 
cation, organization, philanthropies and co-operative movements that are 
mostly failures because the experience of the past it not utilized. The evo- 
lution of industries and the professions and the social organisms generally 
with special reference to parasitism and mutualism are appropriately 
handled. 

CHAPTER XIX.— Analogy. 

The remarkable relationship of all natural events. Law of relativity. 
Physics and chemistry of life and mind. The social organism constructed 
from the individual elements. Analogies of society and animals. The uni- 
versal relationship. 

CHAPTER XX.— Conclusion. 

A summary of the preceding chapters is made to enable a grasp of the 
contents in their general bearings. 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 



CHAPTER I. 

EARLIEST MEN. 

You will sometimes hear old folks express a wish for a return 
of the "good old days" of their youth. This disposition of old 
people to regard recent times as inferior to remote periods is 
recorded as universal and as a senile characteristic as far back 
as we can go in history. A little reflection shows that modern 
times are better than the ancient. 

Recently there were no electric or gas lights, no electric cars 
or telephones, horses pulled the street cars. There were no type- 
writers, bicycles or automobiles, no ice-machines, no modern bat- 
tle-ships, when wooden "men-of-war" moved with sails. When 
the nineteenth century opened there were no steam-cars or steam- 
ships. Candles dimly lighted houses and churches that were poor- 
ly heated in winter; there were no postage stamps, steel pens, 
friction matches, sewing machines, photographs, city sewerage, 
hard coal fires, and machinery of all sorts was very simple, while 
fruits, vegetables or meats were not canned. 

But the nineteenth century was progressive beyond preceding 
times, and progress is one of the forms of evolution, the evidences 
of which are all about us. Today in the world's history we have 
telegraphs, railways, steamships. Voyages at sea are now made 
in a few days where formerly sailing vessels used many weeks 
to go the same distance. We have the daily newspaper and en- 
gravings so cheap as to be within the means of the poor. 

Yesterday, so to speak, there were none of these things. 
Horses pulled clumsy stage coaches through muddy roads, 
printed books were unknown. Fulton and Watts had not thought 
out their primitive engines. Step by step the conveniences of to 
day were evolved by gradual, toilsome improvements upon past 
things and methods. 



2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Half a thousand years ago America was unknown to Euro- 
peans, unless the Vikings knew of it. London, Edinburg, Paris 
were unpaved, torch-lighted ; their streets were infested with rob- 
bers and assassins. And yet back of this time was a state of 
things still worse. A thousand years ago mercenary armies 
swarmed over Europe, while feudal predatory man was in dis- 
position much like the sharks, crocodiles and tigers of the seas, 
rivers and jungles. It is difficult to imagine a period when we 
had no compass, engines, telescopes, barometers, thermometers, 
sciences of any sort, no gunpowder or firearms, or even soap 
and towels ; a time when no one knew how to read or write, for 
there was no alphabet. Ljng-haired and bearded pirates skirted 
the shores with their rude war-vessels, Vandals, Goths and Huns 
overran the continents and islands, armed with bows and spears. 
Still another step and man was a naked savage with the rudest of 
tools and weapons. And far enough back in the world's making 
there were no men or other animals, and even plants had a be- 
ginning. 

A rough general statement of an early period of the earth's 
condition pictures a hot sea covering the globe, and, as the earth 
cooled and contracted, wrinkles in the shape of mountain chains 
thrust peaks miles above the sea surface, some of which made is- 
lands, while longer ranges skirted basins which later filled in by 
the washing down of the high mountains or rose from the sea 
as continents. Modern maps show coast-range rims to the larger 
bodies of land. The vapor from the hot sea at the base of the 
ranges rose high in the air and becoming condensed fell as rain 
and snow upon the peaks, packing into glaciers which during 
ages of gradual movement downward, together with the action 
of fierce storms and torrents from the melting ice, washed the 
mountain elevations down into the sea and formed the adjoin- 
ing plains, though some of these expanses may also have risen 
from the ocean or have been created by the falling of the sea 
level. It is conceivable that at one time all there was of Europe, 
Asia, America and Africa consisted in such mountain chains, 
vastly higher than what remains of them, rising above the uni- 
versal hot ocean. Between the sea level and highest elevations 
there were all the temperatures to be found between the tropics 



EARLIEST MEN. 3 

and the poles, and marine forms could find space and conditions 
favorable to evolution into the highest of land and air types in 
numberless such regions without recourse to migrations from 
long distances, though at later epochs such intermixtures oc- 
curred. My special contention is the sufficiency of many local en- 
vironments to have developed species of many kinds within iso- 
lated regions and that all the different races of men have not 
sprung from a single source. 

James Geikie 1 enumerates, in his chapter on the glacial suc- 
cession in Europe, separate periods : 

I. Preglacial Times. Genial climatic conditions indicated 
during the older pliocene system. The sea was over the east and 
south of England, in Belgium, Holland, northern and western 
France and the coast lands of the Mediterranean. The luxuriant 
plants of the land and the great mammals of the pliocene retreated 
gradually before the approaching winter of the glacial period, 
equatorial sea forms also retreated south and were replaced by 
arctic plants and animals. 

II. First glacial epoch. A thoroughly arctic fauna lived in 
the North Sea, great snow fields came into existence and a 
gigantic glacier occupied the basin of the Baltic. The mountains 
of Britain were ice clad as were the Alps. In central France 
large glaciers descended from the volcanic cones of Auvergne and 
Coutal, and deployed upon the plateaux, and probably in many 
other districts similar conditions existed. 

III. First interglacial epoch. The cold passed away, the 
arctic fauna retreated from the North Sea and dry land occupied 
the southern part of that sea up to the latitude of Norfolk at 
least. Across this new-formed land flowed the Rhine and other 
rivers. A temperate flora with hippopotami, elephants, deer and 
other mammals filled Europe and England. A luxuriant decidu- 
ous flora was in the Alps at heights it now no longer attains, with 
elephants, and this filled a long period. 

IV. Second glacial epoch. The greatest of European ice 
sheets appeared covering all the northern part of the continent 
and flowed south into Saxony. The Alp glaciers reached their 

1 The Great Ice Age, p. 607. 



4 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

greatest extension and in other mountains of Europe snow fields 
and glaciers made their appearance. Arctic alpine plants came to 
occupy the low grounds of central Europe and northern annual 
plants ranged down to the shores of the Mediterranean. 

V. Second interglacial epoch. Prolonged duration of the 
previous stage attested by moraines and then the climate became 
genial, northern flora retreated north and southern flora came 
north and southern mammals came up again. Then the climate 
deteriorated and the flora and fauna migrated again as the third 
glacial epoch approached. Much low lying land in northwestern 
and northern Europe was submerged. This interglacial period 
was of long duration. 

VI. Third glacial epoch. At the climax of this epoch a most 
extensive ice sheet again overwhelmed the major portion of the 
British isles and a vast area of the continent, but it did not at- 
tain the dimensions of its predecessor. From the Alps great 
glaciers again descended to the low grounds, where they dropped 
the terminal moraines of the inner zone. 

VII. Third interglacial epoch. After the disappearance of 
glacial conditions the Baltic became tenanted by a temperate 
North Sea fauna while the adjacent lands supported a corre- 
sponding terrestrial fauna and flora. 

VIII. Fourth glacial epoch. In the early stages of this 
epoch the low grounds of Scotland were submerged to the ex- 
tent of a hundred feet at least, while an arctic marine fauna lived 
around the coasts. 

Eventually the various mountain districts were cased in ice 
and snow, large glaciers filled the highland fiords and sent ice- 
bergs to the sea, implying a snow line of 1,000 or 1,600 feet in 
.elevation. But the greatest ice was Baltic, an ice sheet covered 
Scandinavia and Finland, and an ice stream flowed from the 
Baltic basin to North Germany and Denmark ; later the ice sheet 
melted, a wide area of Scandinavia was submerged in a cold sea 
which communicated widely with the Baltic. In the Alps smaller 
glaciers than previously appeared and local glaciers were in the 
valleys of some of the mountain ranges of middle Europe. 

IX. Fourth interglacial epoch. The British isles were part 
of the continent, the cold sea retreated from Scandinavia but the 



EARLIEST MEN. 5 

Baltic became a lake, but later submergence again came, and the 
sea was filled with a more glacial climate fauna than at present. 

X. Fifth glacial epoch. Moraines indicate a snow line of 
2,500 feet in the British isles and submerged Scottish coast is- 
lands to 50 feet below the present level. 

XL Fifth interglacial epoch. Land re-emerged and valley 
glaciers retreated. Northwest Europe drier and forest growths 
were abundant. 

XII. Sixth glacial epoch. Snow line at 3,500 feet in Scot- 
land and limited submergence of Scotland 20 or 30 feet. Forests 
decayed and peat bogs extended their area. 

XIII. The present time in Britain is marked by the modern 
sea-level and return of a milder and drier condition and final dis- 
appearance of permanent snowfields. 

Professor Frankland 2 says that a satisfactory theory must 
take cognizance of the following points in the history of the gla- 
cial period : 

1. That its effects were felt over the entire globe. 2. That 
it occurred, or at least terminated, at a geologically recent period. 
3. That it was preceded by a period of indefinite duration in 
which glacial action was altogether wanting or was confined to 
regions of considerable altitude. 4. That during its continuance 
atmospheric precipitation was much greater, and at one period 
the height of the snow line was considerably less than at pres- 
ent. 5. That it was followed by a period extending to the pres- 
ent time, when glacial action became again insignificant. 

In order to secure a sufficient supply of ice to constitute a 
glacial epoch we must, in the first place, have an adequate amount 
of aqueous vapor in the atmosphere, and this could only arise 
from heated waters of the ocean, and Frankland concludes that a 
sole cause of the glacial epoch was a higher temperature of the 
ocean than that obtaining at present. I. That a higher oceanic 
temperature would give rise to an increased evaporation and 
consequently to an augmented atmospheric precipitation. 2. 
That this increased atmospheric precipitation would augment the 

2 Philosophical Magazine, May, 1864, Quoted by Sir H. H. Hovvarth, 
Glacial Nightmare, Vol. 2, p. 23- 



O THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

average depth of permanent snow upon the ice bearers and would 
within certain limits depress the snow line. 

James CrolP claims that Frankland was wrong in trying to 
account for phenomena of glacial action by terrestrial heat, as the 
glacial sea was cold and not hot. Of course it was, in the vicin- 
ity of the bergs, but while the lofty mountains made the glaciers 
the hot sea melted them. Dawson's fossil objections to Frank- 
land's idea are also met by great heat and intermediate tempera- 
tures all the way to great cold to account for the fossils found. 
Frankland's hypothesis covers all the conditions and does away 
with the need of twisting the earth out of its position to account 
for only a portion of the facts while ignoring such as bear 
against so forced a conclusion. Howarth 4 admits that we should 
have traces of an arctic fauna and flora in the surface beds of the 
tropics, but they nowhere occur, and there is an absence of typ- 
ical North American plants in the highlands of the West Indies 
and the Andes of the equator. 

Taking Geikie's epochs, seriatim, Frankland's hot earth and 
sea explain them thus : I. The snow line was high with a tem- 
perate region on the mountain sides above the hot sea, but as the 
sea grew less hot the snow and ice line came lower and animals 
and plants moved southward. II. The receding of the sea would 
account for the ice advance, the land appearing by elevation from 
the sea with denudation of the hills as the earth shrank and piled 
up and filled in plains which became colder through distance from 
the hot sea. III. Mountains gradually denuded forming new 
lands in Europe with melting of glaciers toward the north and 
up the mountains. IV. Ice sheet over Europe and sea less hot 
and farther south while northern animals ranged down to the 
Mediterranean. V. Glaciers gradually melted by southern sun 
and terrestrial heat with temperate climate and later much land 
in upper Europe submerged by melting ice. VI. Another ice 
sheet covered Europe, but it was not so extensive as the first one. 
VII. Baltic and adjacent land filled with temperate fauna. VIII. 
Submergences from melting ice. Snow line 1,000 to 1,600 feet. 
IX. Temperate, warmer than at present, but sea not hot. X. 

3 Climate and Cosmology, 1886. 

4 Glacial Nightmare, p. 492. 



EARLIEST MEN. 7 

Snow line 2,500 feet, so it was higher than in the preceding gla- 
cial epoch. Scottish coast lands under 50 feet of water, so the 
sea was less deep. XL Land re-emerged and forests grew and 
valley glaciers retreated. XII. Snow line 3,500 feet in Scot- 
land anil land under 20 or 30 feet of water, forests decayed. XIII. 
The present, with snow fields retreated northward. 

James Croll, of H. M. geological survey of Scotland 5 gives 
a theory of the secular changes of the earth's climate and quotes 
Morlot on two glacial periods separated by an intermediate one 
in which the ice that covered the greater part of Europe disap- 
peared even in the principal valleys of the Alps to a height of 
4,400 feet above the present level of the sea. Morlot thinks there 
may have been a cosmical cause : "Wild as it may have appeared 
when first started the idea of general and periodical eras of re- 
frigeration for our planet connected perhaps with some cosmic 
agencv may eventually prove correct." 6 

Croll 7 speaks of evidences of warm periods in the arctic re- 
gion, fir trees having existed in latitude 74 ° 48', he cites from 
Sir William Hooper's report that the Pinus alba examined by 
him from the arctic regions consisted of alternate zones of narrow 
and broad growth as though the climate was hotter part of the 
year than at another. Probably the terrestrial heat with the solar 
was the most exuberant stage and corresponded to the summer, 
and the lesser heat afforded by the hot sea and ground alone for 
the balance of the year accounted for the smaller zone. Arctic 
regions were warm during the Permian period and there is a 
close resemblance of the Permian flora to that of the Carboni- 
ferous, pointing to a former prevalence of a warm and equable 
climate, and a warm sea must have been in high latitudes from 
the magnesium limestone there. 

Frankland's hypothesis explains the stages Croll adopts : 
First mountains with glacial peaks and hot sea base in the polar 
regions and snow line high at the equator because of combined 
sun and earth heat. Second, formation of plains and subsidence 
of sea with less terrestrial heat than formerly but sufficient to 

5 Climate and Time in Their Geological Relations. 
8 Edinburg New Philos. Jour. Vol. II., p. 28. 
7 Ibid., p. 261. 



8 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

produce luxuriant vegetation and develop animals abundantly. 
The mountains lowering by washings with a corresponding rise 
of the glacial and snow eminences. Third, cooling of the earth 
and lowering of mountains by water and ice action could bring 
the ice sheets and glaciers farther south toward the Ohio and 
Mediterranean as they melt. Fourth, when the final melting took 
place the present epoch arrived. 

Snow would lie higher up on mountains at the equator owing 
to the united effect of the perpendicular sun and the heat of the 
earth and sea, in ages before the earth was cooler. Proper regard 
for Frankland's idea would explain away the apparent inconsis- 
tency of the ice line going higher up the mountain as the earth 
cooled. The sea being less hot there would be vastly less vapor 
to condense, and not so much snow would fall, and as what was 
melted was not replaced the singular result would be that while 
great heat made deeper snow less heat brought less snow T , and as 
the earth grew cooler the snow peaks went higher. 

Dana 8 gives the relative lengths of geological ages in their 
time ratios based on the maximum thicknesses of the rock forma- 
tions and the rate of sedimentation and erosion. The whole dura- 
tion of geological time he places at 200,000,000 years ; deducting 
for the Archean the rest of the time would be 130 million years. 
Reade gives 95 million, Walcott 70 million, Hutchison 600 mil- 
lion, McGee 6,000 million, and Kelvin 100 million. Dana sums 
up the results of speculation as between ten million and six thou- 
sand million years. The relative duration of the Cambrian and 
Silurian, the Devonian and Carboniferous correspond to the ratio 
of 4^ to 1 :i, or perhaps 4:1 :i, and for the Paleozoic, Mezozoic 
and Cenozoic 12:3:1. Since the glacial, Lyell, 31,000 years, 
Spencer 32,000 years. Reptiles appeared first in the Permian 
but their age was the Mezozoic. Mammals began then but their 
age was the Cenozoic. So man came in the Quaternary and pos- 
sibly in the Tertiary, while the present is his age. 

The Appalachian west of the Blue Range was the marginal 
bottom of the interior Palezoic sea. During the Carboniferous 
it was sometimes above or below the sea. The Sierra was the 

"Manual of Geology, p. 1023. 



EARLIEST MEN. 9 

first born of the Cordilleran Range, the marginal bottom line of 
the Pacific. The Alps during the Mesozoic and early Tertiary 
was the marginal sea bottom. At the end of the Eocene these 
were crushed together and folded upward. The Himalavas were 
similarly constructed. 

A. H. Keane 9 regards the Tertiary as occupying 3 per cent of 
time; the Eocene with its mammals 1,250,000 years; the Miocene 
with higher apes 1,000,000 years; the Pliocene with man-like 
apes 850,000 years. Many geologists now believe the ice age 
Pliestocene of the Quaternary or Post Tertiary was more prob- 
ably coincident with elevation rather than subsidence. The arctic 
and tropic fauna were mixed and men-like apes were already 
spread over the dry land of most of the world with palaeolithic 
man. The approximate beginning of the strictly Pliestocene or 
Quaternary times was 600,000 years ago, and the duration was 
about 530,000 years. The Post Pliocene or pre-historic time of 
neolithic man was scarcely less than 60,000 years and probably 
more largely coincides with the general disappearance of ice and 
appearance of men of the new stone age. 

The historic or present age has been stated as proven to be 
10,000 years and archaeological prospects promise to push this 
length of time much further backward. 

Joseph Le Conte 10 in an article on Critical Periods in the His- 
tory of the Earth says : 

"Great and comparatively rapid changes in organic forms are 
produced in the following ways : I. The changes in physical 
geography open gateways and permit migrations in many direc- 
tions. 2. The changes in climate compel migrations mainly 
north and south. 3. These migrations in their turn precipitate 
different faunas and floras upon one another, producing severe 
struggles between invaders and natives, and therefore the de- 
struction of many forms of both, and large modifications of the 
survivors. 4. The foreign invasion compels many natives in 
their turn to migrate and so the wave of invasion, of severer 
struggle and of consequent changes is propagated as far as physi- 
cal conditions will allow migration. The effect of all this must 

* Ethnology, 1896, Ch. IV., Antiquity of Man. 

10 Univ. of Cal. Bulletin of Dept. of Geology, Aug., 1895. 



IO THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

be a more rapid evolution of organic forms as the result (a) of 
a new environment and (b) of a severer struggle for life. The 
more rapid rate of evolution and especially new opportunities 
give rise to higher dominant classes. These higher dominant 
classes again in turn determine changes in lower forms, especially 
their immediate rivals, and these changes are again propagated 
downward through the whole organic kingdom and compel a new 
adjustment of the whole on a different basis." 

Le Conte further holds that "the great theater of physical 
changes, of extensive migrations and of severe struggle and there- 
fore of rapid evolution, especially of higher forms, and therefore 
also the place of first appearance of dominant classes has un- 
doubtedly been what Huxley calls Arctogsea, i. e., those parts of 
North America and Eurasia that are north of the Himalayas and 
Sahara, or all the northern hemisphere north of Central America, 
Sahara and the Himalayas. This, the greatest body of contigu- 
ous land, has in later geological times been sometimes divided 
and ' sometimes united. It has been subject to the greatest 
changes, the widest migrations, the severest conflicts, and there- 
fore the most rapid evolution of dominant forms. But these 
dominant forms have from time to time as opportunity offered 
invaded more southern lands and always as conquerers." 

In the Miocene and early Pliocene the climate of Greenland 
was like what we find in Cuba today. There were monkeys, ele- 
phants and other tropical animals, but as the earth cooled and 
the ice covered these regions animal and vegetable life changed 
to that of the present kind. Immediately before, during or imme- 
diately after the glacial period man first appeared in the earth, at 
least it is in the strata of this time that we find the first traces of 
his presence. Man can live and thrive in a range of 200 degrees 
temperature and in valleys far below sea level, like that of the 
Dead Sea, and on table lands and mountains 15,000 to 20,000 
feet above the sea, where even the cat perishes. Some are exclu- 
sively vegetarian while others eat nothing but animal food. Pata- 
gonians go naked in a cold climate and some people in the tropics 
are constantly clothed. Man lives in arid deserts and in north- 
east India where the rain fall is 300 inches annually. Man is 
stronger than his surroundings, he adapts himself to them or 



EARLIEST MEN. I I 

the} adapt themselves to him, an instance of the former being 
seen in the Eskimo being cheerful, garrulous and inventive 
amidst his gloomy surroundings. The rare air of high regions 
expands the chest, and tribes on the highlands of Peru and Bo- 
livia, at 10,000 feet, have long bodies, broad chests and short 
legs. Limits of height are placed at 6 feet 4 inches for Polyne- 
sians. feet for Kaffirs, 5 feet y 2 inch for Asiatic Malays, and 
$h.j inches for Bushmen. Puberty in the tropics is three years 
earlier than elsewhere. Slant eyes are not peculiar alone to Mon- 
golians and not even extensive among them. D'Obigny found 
a tribe in South America with such eyes. The steatopagy or 
large rumps of the Hottentot women persisted through sexual 
selection, and some of the women are unable to rise when seated 
without help. 

Races differ in anatomy, physiology, location, language, cus- 
toms mental processes and even in their parasites. Brunettes 
have more odor than blondes, the Semitic more than the Aryans 
and negroes most of all. Blonde invaders of ancient times came 
by sea and land but always from the north. 

At first men are naturally hunters, warlike and cruel, requir- 
ing' a wide range of space for seeking game, then they became 
pastoral, but as they must move their herds from one pasture to 
another they are likely to become nomadic, and having to defend 
their flocks they are alert and aggressive. When they settle down 
to agriculture their manners soften, the slaves they have made 
from prisoners of war become serfs and in such ways civilization 
develops from unpromising beginnings. Early men were dis- 
orderly, uncleanly, uncouth and rough, loving turmoil and pillage, 
with low grade intelligence, their immature minds slowly rising 
to the possibility of making a fire by rubbing two sticks together, 
and it is not so long ago when our grand parents used tinder 
boxes in which were kept flint, steel and tow with which fires 
were lighted. 

The long arms and short legs of the man-like apes are due to 
living in trees and using the hands for climbing, the feet being 
turned inward to grasp the tree, and when children have weak 
ankles with turned-in feet it is a reversion to the older ape-like 
form through the later acquired muscles of the lower leg not 



12 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

fully developing. The human infant grasps and can hang from 
a stick when just born, like its monkey cousins; the protruding 
abdomen of the child is the same in Bushmen and pygmies and 
in the sketches made by cave dwellers. When early ape-like men 
left the forests to chase game across wide plains, and were com- 
pelled to develop fleetness to keep from being devoured them- 
selves, their legs grew longer than their arms and a superior 
alertness also developed. Archaeology shows that cave men were 
filthy beasts, dwelling in uncleaned holes, doubtless with no per- 
manent mating, or such as began with violence and ended in 
slavery, Geikie 11 concludes that after having occupied English 
caves for untold ages Palaeolithic man disappeared forever and 
with him vanished many animals now either locally or wholly 
extinct. 

The animals living at the same time with man during the 
glacial period were the lion, leopard, hyena, elephant, hippopota- 
mus, mastodon, elk, musk-sheep, reindeer, wolverine, fox, mar- 
mot, lemming, ibex, vole and chamois. 

In parts of the Alps and in polar regions man is still in the 
ice age. He inhabited Europe when the melting snow formed 
rivers at high levels, much longer than those of our time. He 
has left his traces in implements of stone or bone. Stone tools 
survived into the bronze and iron age just as we find some tribes 
using flint arrow heads at this time. The deposits in which He 
the remains of the early human traces are cavern loam, river allu- 
vium, lake bottoms, peat mosses, sand dunes, and other super- 
ficial accumulations ; and the animal remains of both tropic and 
arctic climates are mixed in the European deposits, which could 
be explained by cold and hot climates succeeding each other, or 
by the high mountains affording the icy temperature in which 
animals and men suited to polar climates developed, the hot sea 
at the base of such mountains at the same time making the foot- 
hills and what few narrow plains there were congenial to tropical 
forms, and between these elevations life adapted to temperate 
regions could thrive. 

The assumption that man descended from a single source 

11 The Great Ice Age, p. 624. 



EARI.IKST MEN. 



*3 



located in a region near Java most favorable to his development 
has less evidence than that several races originated in widely 
separated parts of the earth. Like causes producing like effects, 
similarly constituted organisms very low in the scale of life could 
build up gradually the different races of men which finally be- 
came more or less mixed as the means of travel improved. Dif- 
ferences as well as resemblances are thus better accounted for. 
Especially is it likely that the stunted races such as the Lapps and 
Eskimo and the Philippine and African dwarfs were separately 
evolved from conditions and progenitors unlike those of the 
Aryan, Semitic or Turanian peoples. The early cave, cliff and 
lake dwellers who preceded the Celts into Europe might just as 
well have sprung into being from more adjacent forests and fields 
as to have come from some more distant spot. The "little men," 
the "fairies" and the "pixies" could have thus had a basis of 
reality in the Aryans having found the forests of their new homes 
full of monkeys, men-like apes and ape-like men with some still 
more human stone-age savages. 

Adopting the polyphyletic origin of mankind in preference to 
the monophyletic, the separate beginnings of races rather than 
that they came from a single source, we are justified in regarding 
the stone age men to have sprung up here and there from ape 
like forms in the mountains of America, Europe and Asia, many 
of whom perished in conflicts with animals or invading races, 
while changes of climate drove out many more. Some of the 
stunted races may be descendants of certain peculiar aborigines. 
The dwarfs of Africa are an ape-like people with an origin sepa- 
rate and maybe antedating that of the larger blacks, though their 
language has been learned from the latter. Many dwarf races 
elsewhere have perished through changed conditions around 
them. 

Stone age Indians may have been indigenous to- North Amer- 
ica or thev may have come by way of the Aleutian islands, or by 
Behring's strait, where America and Asia are only 36 miles 
apart, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that the Peruvian 
civilization began and ended at its birthplace in the Andes of 
South America- without aid from abroad. There were cities in 
this new world that rivaled those of the old world, lighted by 



14 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

night, policed, containing palaces, temples, courts, schools, parks, 
aquaeducts and fountains with graded roads and with workers in 
gold, silver, copper and bronze. The mound builders of the north 
have been claimed to be descendants of aborigines among whom 
some Welshmen settled. The tradition being that driven by 
storms to the coast of America long before Columbus sailed they 
followed down the Ohio river and founded the Natchez and 
Mandan tribes with others that have built mounds from the 
sources of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to their mouths. 
The remnant of these tribes at Fort Berthold use tub-shaped 
boats made of hides such as ancient Welshmen were found to be 
paddling about in by the Romans, and are said to speak a Welsh 
dialect. Certainly the Mexican Aztecs had bloodthirsty rites 
resembling the religious butcheries of human beings by the 
Druids, which with what they knew of "civilization" may have 
been taught them by visitors from across the sea as their legends 
declared. The Yucatan Maias are reported to have been mixed 
with Japanese of 15 centuries ago as architectural remains are 
said to indicate, but in all these cases where advance beyond sav- 
agery is made by a race it is not necessary to imagine that the 
body of the race came from afar; it was often only the instruc- 
tion, and in the case of the Peruvians what they knew appears 
to have been of home production. 

The subsequent settlers among the primitive people of Amer- 
ica, in some cases exerminating them, were Polynesians, Maoris, 
Hawaiians and Malays generally. Mexico tracing its Toltecs, it 
is stated, to emigrants from Catalina island. The indigenous and 
peculiar antique American civilizations rank with those of the 
Assyrians and Hindoos. 

After an investigation of the "Lansing skull," found March 
23, 1902, on a farm near Lansing, Kansas, Curator Long, of the 
Kansas City Public Museum, and Professor Williston, of Kan- 
sas University, believe it to be the skull of a prehistoric man, who 
probably lived during the glacial period, 35,000 years ago. The 
skull was found under well defined strata of earth and rock and 
river loess. 



EARLIEST MEN. I 5 

Prof. Warren K. Morehead 12 disposes of many illusions and 
superstitions concerning- the original inhabitants of America. 
They were of rather low grade intelligence, divisible into broad 
and long heads with specimens of skulls occasionally found of a 
very low type resembling the Neanderthal skull with its project- 
ing eyebrow ridges and retreating low forehead. 

Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the explorer, 13 says that the short 
races about the Western Chilean Channels and Strait are imper- 
fectly developed, living on snails, crabs and fish and they have 
become almost extinct and were always the lowest and most 
abject of Fuegians. A similar race is in the Cape Horn region. 
A third race is one of giants called Onas by their neighbors and 
Yahgans they call themselves. They refuse missionaries and 
mistrust white men with good reason. They live on the main 
island of Tierra Del Fuego which is as large as New York State, 
guarding it carefully to keep others out, but the gold miners and 
sheep raisers have pushed these giants into the useless highlands 
to starve or freeze. 

Scattered over the world are many highlands and peaks as 
well as mountain ranges that must have protruded as islands 
above the primeval hot sea, affording means for sea animals to 
gradually develop into forms suited to the land or to inhabit both 
land and sea, water reptiles into land reptiles and some of these 
into birds and mammals which by being able to generate internal 
heat were enabled to survive in higher, colder regions than those 
to which their progenitors were confined, through having their 
heat supplied by the temperature of the medium in which they 
lived. There could have been ages elapsing between the spring- 
ing up of the different main races of men who, thousands of 
years later, may have mixed to a greater or less extent. Austra- 
lia, for instance, is very much in arrears in the stages of devel- 
opment of its animal life, and is more akin to the Tertiary epoch 
than that of any other era, and the highest mammals of America 
are far behind those of the old world, and there are no man-like 

12 Primitive Man in Ohio, 1892, and in other books recording his im- 

portant researches. 

13 The Giant Indians of Tierra Del Fnego, March, 1900, Century Mas::-.- 



i6 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 



apes in America, but the conditions in Chili and Peru appear to 
have favored a rapid evolution of man, while the aborigines of 
Australia were in keeping with the low stages of development 
of the animals there in general. 

In the tropical Eurasian Miocene there lived an anthropo- 
morphic ape, Drvopithecus Fontanii, and Bourgeois and Hany 
believe that the flint flakes and scrapers found in the Miocene 
strata of Thenay belonged to that period, so man lived with the 
mastodon, rhinoceros and other animals of the Miocene. 

Leaving out of consideration poetical accounts of ancient 
dwarfs such as Homer made when he said they were as big as 
your fist and their deadly enemies were the cranes, there are 
authentic observations of these small people. Herodotus men- 
tions negro dwarfs in Libya ; Aristotle located them in the upper 
Nile; DuChaillu, Schweinfurth and Stanley describe them, and 
they have also been found in the Philippines. Professor D. C. 
Worcester of the American Commission to that place reports that 
there are about 25,000 of these pigmies, and that they are remark- 
ably like monkeys, Dr. Becker placing their height at four feet 
eight inches ; the women being about four inches shorter. Their 
chests and calves are poorly developed, each big toe is widely 
separated from the other toes, their feet are large and clumsy 
and their hair grows in scattered clumps over the scalp, their 
heads are too large for their bodies and their woolly mops make 
this appear greater ; they can counterfeit apes in a startling man- 
ner, their jaws projecting far beyond their noses and their faces 
being deeply wrinkled like those of monkeys; they are naked 
except for loin cords and a clout or apron. They are monogam- 
ous and win wives by test of marksmanship with bows and blunt 
arrows, the woman being the target. These negritos have never 
been subdued by the Malays or Spaniards, they are gentle and 
do not murder wantonly but are suspicious of Christians who 
abuse them. They defend themselves vigorously and retaliate 
by robbing and destroying fields and villages at night. To their 
children they give the names of birds, plants and insects. They 
cannot count above ten and have no names for colors, though 
they can tell them apart. They desert the sick if a plague such 
as cholera or small dox breaks out. 



EARLIEST MEN. 17 

The favorite weapon of the dwarfs wherever found has been 
the poisoned arrow, and their marksmanship is unerring. C. 
Morris 14 says "the pigmies are always hunters, making the deep 
forests their home, and they are masters through their agility, 
cunning and deadly weapons, of the world of lower animals. 
Physically they are not far removed from the man-ape, their 
remote ancestor, for they retain various ape-like characters, as in 
aspect of face, shape of body, occasional hairiness, diminutive 
size, shortness of legs, imperfect development of calf, occasional 
waddling gait in walking, etc." 

Morris further remarks that "in the Lapps of northern 
Europe we have another small race, possibly the lineal descend- 
ants of the Quaternary pigmies. Everywhere the small man has 
been forced to retire into forests, deserts and icy barrens before 
the stronger and taller men? The folk-lore of Europe is full of 
traditions of a race of dwarfs and their conflicts with men of a 
larger mold, and there are various indications that this race was 
once wide spread.'' 

The remains of stone age men are found all over Europe with 
the bones of elephants, lions, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, hyenas 
and mammoths, dating from the rough stone age or palaeolithic 
period when rude flints, boulders, bones or pieces of horn and 
wood were the tools and weapons. Some of the tribes were with- 
out fires and even in our time there are savages who do not know 
the uses of fire in cooking. Worsae estimates the Scandinavian 
stone age as during and previous to 3,000 B. C, Bunsen estimat- 
ing the human race as at least 20,000 years old, so it was during 
this time that the stone age began. The next age, that of polished 
stone, the neolithic, in the same region, extending between B. C. 
2,000 and 1,000, when men carefully polished their stone imple- 
ments. Kitchen middens or refuse heaps abound in Denmark 
and southward, in which are found shells and bones with other 
remains of the food eaten by these primitive people. There are 
races now living still in the stone age. The North American 
Indians were in this stone age state when America was discovered 
and many of them have not advanced beyond it. Aztecs got as 
far as the copper stage and the Peruvians passed to the bronze 

14 Man and His Ancestor, p. 156. 



l8 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

age, while all other natives continued to use stone tools and 
weapons. Numerous stone circles in Britain and Ireland are 
thirty feet up to twelve hundred feet in diameter. The most im- 
posing is near Devizes in Wiltshire, which Lubbock refers to the 
beginning of the bronze age. Stonehenge was built later. Many 
of these circles proved to be burial places, the original mound 
of earth covering them having washed away, while some were 
presumed to be temples. Carnac in Brittany consists of eleven 
rows of unhewn stone twenty-two feet or less in height. The 
avenues extended for miles. Most of the great tumuli in Brit- 
tany belong to the stone age. 15 

The bronze period for Scandinavia is placed at B. C. 1,000 
to 500. 

The early iron age generally for Europe dates from about 
A. D. 1 to 450, the later iron age extending between A. D. 700 to 
1,000, but in Scandinavia the stone age lingered along in places 
as it did elsewhere in the north. The Eskimo are practically still 
in the stone age. Morlot assigns to the age of stone 7,000 years, 
bronze 4,200 years and to the early Roman period 1,800 years. 

The Turanians form one of the oldest and largest races, for 
wherever the Aryans went they appear to have conquered a 
Turanian people and to have finally amalgamated with it. The 
origin of the name is in the Aryans calling Persia by the name 
of Iran, the land of light, after they settled there, and the north 
country full of barbarians they named Turan, or the land of 
darkness. As it is customary for primitive people to group all 
foreigners together as one race, these Turanians may have been 
composite, but ethnologists divide them into two branches, the 
Ugro-Finnic and Dravidian, 16 another division is into the Turkic, 
Ugric, Finnic and Mongolic divisions. The Finns were a hunt- 
ing folk, low in civilization, with neither wool, salt nor wagons 
with wheels, nor could they count to a hundred. 17 The Finns 
preceded the Finno-Tartars, or Ural-Altaic family into Europe, 
the latter coming during historic times. Their relatives the 
Magyars settled in Hungary and were left there as the other 

15 Sir J. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, Chapter V. 

16 F. Lenormont, Manual of Ancient History of the East, b. I.. Cb. 4. 
17 Hehn, Culturpflanzen. 



EARLIEST MEN. 



I( J 



Ugrics abandoned them and returned to Asia. The Manchu 
branch of Tartars captured China and mixed with the Mongols, 
though keeping themselves as distinct as possible for governing 
purposes, but passion is everywhere stronger than policy, account- 
ing for the dark complexions of the children of white Aryan 
nobles among the Hindoo, the mixing of "children of the sun" 
with the "children of the earth" among the exclusive Aztecs, the 
Inca being regarded as a god. The tawny Egyptian skin comes 
from the governing white Semites being absorbed to extinction 
among the African blacks, as the few conquering Xormans were 
finally lost among the multitude of Saxons of England. The 
Ugro-Finns subdivided into Turks, Hungarians, Finns,- Esto- 
nians and nearly all northern tribes in Europe and Asia. The 
Dravidian branch is in the south, consisting of the people of Hin- 
dustan, the Tamils, Telingos, Carnates, who were subjugated by 
the Aryans. 

The Caucasus acted as a barrier between the north and south, 
stopping and turning aside the moving populations, and it also 
sheltered remnants of many different peoples driven into it. It 
is a kind of ethnological museum of countless races and lan- 
guages, probably some from the early ages of the world. The 
term Caucasian is meaningless to designate any race, for the 
Caucasus is full, as in Strabo's time, of races differing in religion, 
languages, aspect, manner and character. 18 The Georgians of 
that region seem to be related to the Iberians of Spain and Ire- 
land. The Circassians are [Mohammedans and were driven out 
by Russia to the number of halt a million in 1866 and settled 
in various Turkish provinces. Their country was 200 miles in 
extent. The w r ild Kurds who have been roaming on the Meso- 
potamian outskirts for ages and who harass the Armenians are 
Turanian nomads. 

The most powerful cause of migrations and of the develop- 
ment of all animals and mankind, physically and mentally, is 
simple, plain, ordinary hunger, and next in importance in such 
matters is the sexual function. These physiological motives have 
filled the earth with life, turmoil, strife, love capers, massacres, 

"J. Bryce, Transcaucasia and Ararat, Ch. II. 



20 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

hates and alliances. Fear, particularly in the form of supersti- 
tion based upon insufficient observation of nature and fostered 
by the designs of those who fatten upon ignorance, comes after 
hunger and sexuality as a motor in human affairs. Then there 
are calamities like great storms, the sudden disappearance of 
rivers, volcanic action, earthquakes, drought, famine, pestilence, 
wars, etc. Peculiar winds gave origin to the conception of com- 
pass points and the incessant illusions of nature, traditional delu- 
sions, the tendency to exaggerate, the lies of travelers, merchants 
and priests, tended to keep the savage brain in a state of bewil- 
derment and childish receptivity for any sort of silly ideas, design, 
ignorance or misinterpretation could impose upon it. 19 

The evolution of the family is by cohesion of several families 
into tribes and these into nations, the change of marriages be- 
tween members of the same family to those between people not 
related causing decided improvement of stock. At first these 
marriages were by force and later by consent. The marriage 
relation is classified as : Consanguine, when between brother and 
sister ; Punaluan when several sisters marry brothers interchange- 
ably and jointly; Syndasmian when a single pair is not exclusive 
and live together during pleasure ; Patriarchal with several wives, 
Monogamian, single and exclusive. While monogamy prevails 
among the most advanced nations, at least as far as pretence 
goes, it dates earlier than Christianity, being practiced in pagan 
Rome and among many primitive tribes who regarded it as ad- 
vantageous ; many birds and other animals pair singly for similar 
reasons. There is a superstitious tendency to ascribe any institu- 
tion regarded as advantageous to a divine origin, disregarding 
the conditions of other kinds elsewhere as having equal claims to 
such distinction. 

In northern Italy and Switzerland are the remains of dwell- 
ings built upon piling in the lakes by a very early folk now 
called lake dwellers and presumed to have been Celts. On the 
shores near these dwellings are evidences of the cultivation of 
barley, wheat and flax and that the horse, ox, sheep, goat, pig 
and dog were domesticated. The lake dwellers had considerable 

19 H. T. Tozer, A History of Ancient Geography, 1887. 



EARLIEST MEN. 2 1 

skill in weaving, rope making and pottery, but they had no pot- 
ter's wheel. 

Ancient burial places called barrows are scattered over Europe 
containing the bones of a long-headed and later a broad-headed 
race. The broad heads are supposed to have been those of the 
Celts, who drove out people like the Basques who had preceded 
them into Europe. These earlier races are presumed to have 
descendants in the dark haired and dark skinned people of Wales, 
Ireland, Corsica and elsewhere. At the dawn of history the Iberi- 
ans found in Spain and southern France were of this dark 
skinned people, and their conservative, stubborn dispositions con- 
trasted with those of the volatile Celts, their neighbors, with 
whom they subsequently mixed and become known as Celtiberi- 
ans. The original Bretons of the northwest similarly were super- 
seded by the Celts in modern Brittany from the British isles in 
the fifth century The Basque descendants of these Iberians are 
found today in Yiscaya, Alava, Guipozcoa and Navarre of Spain 
and in the French" department of basses Pyrenees. The Ivernians 
of Ireland, now also lost in the Celtic population, and the Liguri- 
ans of the gulf of Genoa who were later absorbed by the Romans, 
were ancient inhabitants. Another early settlement was made 
by Etruscans in Italy. All these were found in possession of 
their various spots in Europe by the swarms of immigrants who 
came out of the far east. 

I. Taylor 20 thinks that because the Greeks called the Etrus- 
cans Turrhenoi that the similarity to Turanian might indicate 
the Etruscans were Turanians. It is of much more consequence 
what a tribe calls itself, for notoriously foreigners are dubbed any 
sort of name usually opprobrious, by adjacent people. The 
Chinese call Europeans foreign devils and barbarian was a favor- 
ite epithet for neighbors to apply to each other. The Etruscans 
called themselves Rasenna and were probably Phoenicians. 

The Latin, Germanic and Slavic descendants of the Aryans 
form the bulk of the European population today, and are domi- 
nant races all over the world especially in Europe, America and 
Australia. The people found in Europe before the Aryans came 

20 Etruscan Researches, Ch. II. 



2 2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

are known as pre-Aryan, there were other races called non-Aryan ; 
these were the ancient Jews, Finno-Tartars or the Ural-Altaic 
family, all of whom reached Europe in historic times, except the 
Finns. 

All tribes the world over have been or remain in the hunting 
and fishing stages of savagery, or the second stage, the pastoral, 
when flocks and herds of animals are kept ; the third stage is the 
farming, which has been gradually improved upon, the farming 
communities representing the highest races and the hunting the 
lowest, while the shepherd races are intermediate. 

Africa is assumed to be divisible between four races, the 
negroes proper, with an enormous number of tribes, occupying 
central Africa, next are the Fulahs with whom the Nubians are 
associated, between Lake Chad and the Niger river, third are 
the Bantus of the south, fourth the bushmen or Bosjesman, and 
included with them sometimes are the Hottentots who live still 
farther south. Kaffirs and Bechuanas are Bantu tribes. North 
and southeast Africa are occupied by Semitic and Hamitic races, 
the latter including Abyssinians and Gallas. 21 The union of the 
Aryan invaders of North Africa with the ancient coast people 
originated the Numidians and Mauri whose descendants are the 
Libyans, Berbers, Moors and others, who are regarded as sepa- 
rate from the negroes and Egyptians. 22 The Kaffirs and Hotten- 
tots were the main aborigines in South Africa. Portuguese dis- 
covery and occupation dates from i486 to 1806, during which the 
Dutch dispossessed them and the English got a foothold at the 
Cape. The Dutch made slaves of the blacks and the English 
bought the negroes and freed them, the Dutch moving north 
where they enslaved more negroes and worked gold mines found 
by Englishmen. 

The Dutch acted on the idea that they were the chosen of 
God to make everybody work for them, but the English also had 
a mission to take all of South Africa they wanted, especially 
where there were gold mines, and a side mission was to free the 
negroes stolen by the Dutch and others. 

Japan had as unreliable early mythology as Europe. It was 

21 A. H. Keane, The African Races. 
22 T. Mommsen, History of Rome, Bk. 8, Ch. XIII. 



EARLIEST MEN. 23 

not till A. D. 600 when Buddhism was introduced that reliable 
Is began. It was ruled by Shoguns from A. D. 1190 to 
iSt 7. but the Mikado was the theoretical head. There never 
were two emperors, as was asserted by European writers, but a 
real infant, who is powerless, figured as ruler, and he was 
changed for another when he adolesced. When Commodore 
Perry, the American envoy, arrived, times were ripe for change, 
with many natives anxious to ride into power over the Shogun's 
fall. Japan awoke to civilized methods, its condition was like 
that of a child threatened with idiocy through being shut out 
from the rest of the world. While Chinamen seem unable to 
assimilate European ideas, apparently through their brains having 
crystallized, so to speak, at an infantile stage of development, the 
bright little Japs are not only able to imitate but to originate, and 
many are the valuable additions they have made to science and 
manufacture since aroused to occidental methods, while the 
Chinese stay at a servile imitative stage. 

China proper was at first very small, its wall was built in the 
third century before Christ, and the origin of these Mongols is 
quite obscure, though they are particular in assigning 2,269,381 
years to their country. They go beyond this also in describing 
a period when there was nothing, and they have a class of phil- 
osophers who go still earlier. 

Philologists find affinities between the speech of the early 
Mongols and that of the Akkads of the Mesopotamian region. 
Chinese literature dates from the sixth century before Christ 
and periods previous to this in their writings are not authentic. 
The earliest Mongol invaders fought the aborigines along the 
Yellow River. Later Jingis Khan, A. D. 121 5, conquered China. 

The great Yellow River of China is called "The Sorrow of 
Han," because it would change its course through thousands of 
square miles of land which it swept away, drowning or starving 
off countries as though its people were of no more consequence 
to nature than so many ants or worms. A drought in the moun- 
tains has killed a million Chinese by famine in a few months. 

A suggestion has been made that can be taken for what it is 
worth, that the slant eyes of Mongols are inherited from squir- 



24 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

rel-like nut eating rodents whose eyes are thus slanted through 
looking at the nut as it was gnawed. 

Confucius, or Kung-fu-tzee, the great Chinese philosopher, 
was born B. C. 551 and did not claim to be gifted above others, 
he merely strove after the good and to know the truth. He 
taught that perfection of manhood was the true aim in life, while 
sincerity, faithfulness and truthfulness afforded the groundwork 
for all his teaching. He was agnostic as to future life and he 
regarded death as merely in the course of nature and not to be 
dreaded. His theory of good government was to begin with the 
individual, to rectify him and the state would become rectified. 

When asked how to do away with thieves, he said : "If you 
were not yourselves covetous they would not steal, even if you 
were to pay them to do so." Sin was to him the cultivation of 
nature upon the plane of the small, mean, selfish, animal man. 
This he considered might come from heredity, accident of birth, 
environment, education or ignorance, over which the sinner may 
have had no control, and for which he was not accountable. He 
thought that rewards and punishments accompanied all deeds, 
those living in accordance with the laws of their being receiving 
noble character with contentment and happiness, while those on 
low animal planes had ignoble characters with anxiety and un- 
happiness. He pitied those who indulged greed and ignoble 
passion. Prevailing religious beliefs he looked upon as childish. 

Malays came from the southeast regions of Asia, from the 
peninsula of farther India, and they spread south, east and west 
over the island world. The first occupation of Sumatra and 
Java was in B. C. 1000, or earlier, about the time of the Aryan 
migration to North India. The Malays are energetic, quick to 
perceive, genial but unscrupulous, cruel and revengeful. Verac- 
ity is unknown, the love of gain is their strongest affection, and 
this has caused them to be navigators, pirates, merchants, 
explorers. They gained Madagascar on the far west and found 
five and a half million negroids there, outnumbering them, but 
the eight hundred thousand Malay Hovas are the masters. 23 The 
Maoris of New Zealand are a higher type of Malay, they came 

23 D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, Lecture VIII. 



EAKLIEST MEN. 25 

to New Zealand about A. D. 1300 from Tahati and Samoa. 
Some ethnologists place their migrations back to 3000 years ago. 

High mountains with streams from icy peaks appear to have 
favored the development of the ape-like man, who still further 
advanced as the warm seas gave place to plains and he gradually 
spread over them in search of prey as a stone age savage. Ages 
pass, and some genius among them fashioned his stone imple- 
ments smoothly by polishing and doubtless many such innovators 
paid the penalty of making improvements by being killed for 
being in league with evil spirits. While still a hunter and fisher, 
he found pieces of copper ore that could be hammered into shape 
for tools, and the most prodigious step was taken when, with 
fire he melted and moulded his tools, spears and arrow heads 
mainly. By accidental admixture of other metals with the copper 
the so-called bronze age arrived, merely because these aborigines 
did not know enough about the union of metals to make bronze 
until the knowledge was forced upon them by finding that the 
new castings were harder than the copper ones. The iron age 
was the last, and before this the raising of herds and flocks caused 
many tribes to pass from the hunting to the shepherd stage. 
The farming stage came to some tribes while still in either the 
stone or bronze period. Xor is it correct to imagine that all 
peoples came through these eras at the same time, for there are 
today some who remain in the stone age, the copper age, the 
hunting stage, or the shepherd stage, as survivals from earlier 
dates. 

The general fondness for hunting and fishing shows that it is 
an easy drop backward to the practices of these ages, and I have 
personally observed that Germanic races, such as the English 
and Scandinavian, if mixed with North American Indians, try 
to lift the latter to their civilized plane, but French Canadians 
and other Latins drop readily to the savage level, and the Mexi- 
cans make the worst renegades among the red men. The fiercest 
compound I ever saw was a mixture of French Canadian, Black- 
foot Indian, Chinaman and Negro. 

But the more we know of historic and pre-historic people the 
more it appears that mixture upon mixture interminably, has 
occurred, and that, strictly speaking, a pure race does not exist. 



26 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Man is still a baby so far as intelligence is concerned and the 
possibilities of what he might grow to be. It has taken millions 
of years for him to think of giving up slavery. It was onlv a 
century ago he learned about the power of steam, and fifty 
years ago that electricity might become his servant ; such things 
as navigation and engineering have just dawned on him, and he 
has yet to appreciate what has been discovered about health and 
disease, the pack still listening to such fakirs as Eddyites, as the 
Africans do to their witch doctors. He has still his brutish 
instincts, his savage love of ornament. Even in organized com- 
binations his robber traits are strongly apparent. But Evolution 
shows that he advances. 



CHAPTER II. 
THE ARYANS. 

Animals in abundance roamed and contended along the shores 
of the primeval sea that washed both sides of the Himalaya range 
of icy peaked mountains where our blonde Aryan ancestry 
originated and developed on the high, wide Pamir plateau, a 
tableland where rank vegetation grew beside broad, rapid rivers 
fed by melting glaciers. 

The Mat plains of this "roof of the world" induced changes in 
the habits of the ape-like men who lived there ; scampering over 
these prairies, their legs were lengthened, and forsaking the tree 
life of their ancestors their arms became shorter. Pithecanthro- 
pus was mainly erect and had outgrown the baby practice of going 
on all fours, and his descendants grew still more erect until 
hands were no longer used as feet and the hind feet ceased to be 
used as hands. Chasing his prey and keeping a sharp lookout 
for enemies, perception and adroitness were developed, together 
with fleetness, a more general intellignce, as he was able to do 
many things other animals could not do, such as subsisting upon 
a mixed diet of fruits and meats, he could travel farther and 
thrive better than animals hampered in diet and in other respects. 

Oscar Peschel 1 remarks that it is easy for those who live in a 
temperate zone to recognize the favorable course of civilization 
of the high plateaux within the tropics. Their inhabitants escape 
the enervating atmosphere of the sultry lowlands ; they are 
obliged to provide clothing and shelter as a protection against 
the weather ; to avoid starvation they are obliged to till the 
ground and store provisions and forced to combine for various 
purposes. Sayce holds that the Aryans inhabited a cold country, 
their seasons were three in number, perhaps four, and not two, 
as would have been the case had they lived south of the temperate 

1 The Races of Men, p. 443. 

27 



28 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

zone. They were nomad herdsmen living in hovels that could be 
erected in a few hours and left again as the cattle moved into 
higher ground with the approach of spring, or descended into the 
valley as the winter advanced. ' Grinding corn was unknown, 
and crushed spelt was eaten instead of bread. Agriculture was 
rude and needles of bone were used to sew skins together, possi- 
bly there was spinning and weaving, though the latter does not 
appear to have advanced beyond plaiting reeds and withes. The 
community lived in the stone age, they made tools of stone and 
bone, and if they used gold or meteoric iron it was of the un- 
wrought pieces picked up from the ground and worn as orna- 
ments. They did not work metals. As among the savage tribes 
the various degrees of relationship were minutely distinguished 
and named, even the wife of the husband's brother receiving a 
special title, but they could count as far as a hundred. They 
believed in a multitude of ghosts and goblins, making offerings 
to the dead and seeing in the bright sky a potent deity. The 
birch, the pine and the withy were known to them ; so also was 
the bear, wolf, hare, mouse, snake, goose, raven, quail and owl. 
Cattle, sheep, goats and swine were all kept, the dog was domes- 
ticated, and probably the horse. Boats with oars were used, 
the boats being possibly hollowed out of trunks of trees. 

. While many of these high tablelands were fertile in these 
earlier periods, great changes have followed up to modern times. 
There are still pastoral regions scattered about these plateaux, 
and the soil is rich and yields sweet and nourishing grasses, but 
the elevation is too high for farming. Mulberry trees thrive 
well and afford flour for the natives found there. The area of 
the Pamir plateau is 37,000 square miles, divided into flat valleys 
running northeast and southwest. It lies buried in snow half 
of the year and does not produce sufficient for the sparse settle- 
ments. Here are the headwaters of the famous Oxus river, and 
great interest has centered about these highlands, owing to 
traditions connected with their having been in remote periods the 
location of great events and dense populations who have left their 
traces in ruined cities and in legends. It is the Tsung-ling of 
Chinese writers, the northern Imaus of Ptolemy, and the moun- 
tain Parnassus of Aristotle ; "the greatest of all that exists 



THE ARYANS. 2Q 

toward the winter sunrise;" it is known as Bam-i-dunia, or "the 
root" of the world." and modern geographers have called it "the 
heart oi Asia." and the "central boss of Asia." The geographical 
indications, according to Reclus, 2 point to it as Meru, the scene 
of the primeval Aryans' paradise. Old Parsee traditions locate 
it as the origin and nucleus of the Aryan migrations. And it is 
here that the Mohammedan invaders identify the Gihon and 
Pison rivers, and claim the Oxus valley as the former paradise 
and other things indicate that here was the "cradle of the human 
race." 

The twin rivers Oxus (Amu-daria)and the Sir-daria flow now 
into the Aral sea, and in prehistoric times they formed a single 
bread river flowing northwest when the glacial torrents were 
higher, running into the Caspian sea, on the west side of which 
are the Caucasus mountains, with old marine shores visible 500 
feet above the present water level, indicating that both the Aral 
and Caspian seas were formerly one body of water and pointing 
to an era when most of Asia and Europe were ocean beds. The 
inference that the Aral could not have been part of the ocean be- 
cause it is less salt than the Mediterranean is from a failure to 
consider that glacial floods have been freshening that sea from 
mountain streams since the original ocean receded. 

At present the hills of the Oxus grow pines and junipers below 
their glaciers, and in some valleys apricots and other fruits. 
Marco Polo spoke of the fine grazing there for stock, the ruins of 
cities, and that there had been many people in the region for- 
merly. But the lakes have become deserts, and the sand has 
filled and changed the river courses, driving the Oxus away from 
the Caspian to the Aral, destroying the vegetation, and depopu- 
lating this once thriving country. The space between the Sir- 
daria and the Ural mountains is known as the region of black 
sands ; between the Oxus and the Sir-daria, that of red sands, 
and south of the Chu, white sands, and by their commingling 
the entire desert is ashy gray in color. The Caspian is more 
salty than the Aral, which is only brackish. There are rivers 
all about that dreadful desert of Gobi that end in the sky, for 
the streams from melted glaciers, wide and deep at first, become 

'Asia, Vol. T. 



30 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

shallow and narrow, and are finally drunk by the hot, dry sands ; 
while a portion passes under the soil, the greater part evaporates, 
so the rivers have no mouths ; rainfalls have often been observed 
to disappear before reaching the ground, the heat causing the rain 
to vaporize. This desert country was once adapted to the 
needs of the people ; it was fertile, covered with flocks and herds, 
and abounding in animals, vegetation and pure water, with a 
sufficiently congenial climate to cause it to be spoken of bv many 
generations of the descendants of those who had been forced 
to leave it. 

By the inclination to "ancientism," or regarding far-off days 
as better than the present, coupled with the disposition to exag- 
gerate, that was customary in the childish period of the world, 
and the oriental inability to confine one's self to facts, it seems 
that the camp-fire tales of the ancient Munchausen^ combined 
into legends of a paradise. The Mohammedan traditions place 
their paradise along the Oxus, while some of the Semitic races 
refer theirs to the upper Mesopotamian valley, north of the 
Tigris. With all races jt was always somewhere else than where 
they then lived. For that matter the Aryans could have devel- 
oped in the Thibetan highlands on the "roof of the world," and 
descended into the Oxus valley as the ocean fell lower and made 
new garden-spots for them, while the great Babylonian civiliza- 
tion had an independent source near the Black sea, with the 
people gradually leaving the high Persian plateau and settling 
along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers as the waters abated, 
becoming mixed with the Akkads and Sumerians of the Mesopo- 
tamian plains, coming from other points of the compass and from 
other centers of development — from lower animals into men. That 
races need not have a single source, and, least of all, have come 
from a single pair, is evident in regarding such descents as that 
of the several breeds of horses which have come from similar 
stock, but not the same pair. 3 Also that American fossil horses 
are proven to have evolved in direct lines wholly distinct from 
the horses of Europe. 

The Aryans sought other lands when their chief river became 
a flood three or four times a year, and the hostile Turanians 

3 Darwin, Origin of Species, Ch. VII. ; Part I., p. 180. 



THE ARYANS, 31 

harassed them and sands drifted over many of their most fertile 
countries. Migrations from these parts appear to have occurred 
at different stages of Aryan development, as they passed through 
the stone age, while hunters, and became pastoral and finally 
agricultural. We may arbitrarily date the earliest wave of 
emigration from Arya at about 50,000 years ago, as there is - 
evidence of the southern route around the Caspian sea having 
been preferred, presumably because the northern may have pre- 
sented physical obstacles. It had, down to historical times, the 
reputation of being full of icy terrors. Explorers may have 
returned to the Oxus and informed the parent tribes of routes 
and other particulars, resulting in a steady annual outpouring of 
young people toward the Caspian, then southwardly and to the 
west, until the south coast of the Black sea was passed, when 
these earliest of immigrants spread over northern and central 
Europe. These first offshoots of the Aryans became the Celts, 
and as rabbits in Australia, and sparrows in America, thrived 
and increased in the new countries, so these newcomers found 
Europe more congenial than Asia. Long before this Turanian 
tribes. Finns, Lapps and Basques, roamed through the whole 
continent, fighting occasional bands of cave-dwellers. All who 
were found in Europe by the Celts were killed off, driven away 
or mingled with. Tribe after tribe of the Celts split off and 
fought one another, and it was not till several tribes confederated 
that they became formidable. Independent tribes were speedily 
subjugated here and there, but they left enough of each other 
to spread widely into hunting and fishing bodies, and their 
dialects grew into separate languages, though still retaining 
their family resemblances. The lake-dwellers of Europe were 
very likely Celts, as are the Bretons of France, the Welsh. High- 
land Scotch, Celtic Irish, Cornish, Manx and the main stock of 
the French. 

While the Aryans were still in the stone age, though several 
thousand years later, the Greek and Roman stock left the old 
Oxus region and gradually settled near the northern shores of 
the Mediterranean, and found the Etruscans had settled in Italy 
before them, having migrated from Phoenicia, a country of 
Semites. Even in these times hosts of people do not know their 



$2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

own grandparents or cousins, though very likely Celts and 
Romans would have differed and fought just the same had they 
been aware of their relationship, so the Celts from the north 
bothered the Greeks and Romans as much as the Turanian 
northerners did their Aryan neighbors. 

Still later the Teutonic branch started away from Arya, taking 
a northward route around the Caspian, an early branch of cohe- 
sive, stalwart and therefore strong people, being the Scandina- 
vian. The Celts and Teutons contended in their northern regions 
and as a legacy of those far-off encounters we have inherited the 
differences of opinion between the Irish and English, the French 
and Germans. 

A final branch of Aryans called the Slavs was driven north 
and northeast by Turanians, but the Slavs finally dominated and 
have penned up many of their enemies in mountain places, or 
driven them to less hospitable regions. The Russian descend- 
ants of the Slavs of today are trying to take away the remnant 
of the liberties of the Finns, whom they drove westward in far- 
off ages, whence the Teutons drove them north into the swamps 
and hills of Finland. Sweden founded the first Russian union 
of Slavonian tribes which sought possession of Turkey. 

All that was left of the parent Aryan settlements broke up and 
went south. Some catastrophe caused them to forsake their land 
and leave in two streams, one of which passed over the Hindu- 
Kush and Himalayan mountains to the Punjab and Ganges, and 
became the controlling race in India. The other branch went 
southwest and became Medes and Persians, who called their 
country Iran, which is the name retained by the modern Persians 
for their present boundaries. Modern Armenians are from the 
ancient Persians, and so they are also Aryans. 

The Aryan settlers in India developed a written literature in 
a language called Sanscrit, which dates back to B. C. 1500, and 
ceased to be spoken in B. C. 200. The Aryans settled in India 
about B. C. 2000, when Assyria was under Babylon and Memphis 
was ruled by Hyksos. The rajahs of Arya fought not only 
the southern low castes, but among themselves also, just as the 
Celts have done. The Hindoo Rig- Veda is a collection of hymns 
and prayers dating from the 10th to the 15th century before 



THE ARYANS. 



33 



Christ, anil Sanscrit descended from the original Aryan language 
just as the Persian and European languages came from the same 
roots. The spoken language separated, as do all languages, into 
the learned ami the unlearned, the Sanscrit was the former and 
the Hindoo was the latter. Sanscrit was intentionally made com- 
plex and was devoted to religion and literature, beyond the touch 
of the vulgar herd, to enable the lofty to take advantage of the 
lowly. All important literary languages, living or dead, are 
Aryan, except Hebrew, Arabic and Egyptian. In the Persian 
branch of the Aryan language is written the Zend-Avesta of the 
great teacher Zoroaster. The Parsees, or fire worshipers of 
modern India, were followers of Zoroaster. 

According to von Ihering 4 the Aryans were originally a pas- 
toral people, living in a hot zone, with their cattle herded in the 
open, as no word for stable was in their language ; leather aprons 
were their ancient dress, and their migrations began in March 
and stopped the last of May. He insists that they were ignorant 
of agriculture till the Akkadians taught them to plough and 
plant later, that they were shepherds, settled and numerous, did 
not live in towns, knew nothing of metals, their laws were unde- 
veloped, they made sacrifices to the dead, and brought the widow- 
burning suttee into India : that the present condition of the low- 
caste Hindus is probably that of the ancient Aryans ; that hunger 
was the cause of the emigrations ; that they put the aged to 
death, and also destroyed the weak and sickly children, as their 
Roman descendants did later. 

Kafiristan is a country near the Pamir plateau in Asia, near 
the region from whence the original Aryans emigrated, and is 
of great interest as the present home of a yellow-haired, blue- 
eyed people called Kaffirs, or infidels, by the Mohammedans, 
because they refuse to give up their ancient religion, and they* are 
constantly fighting the Musselmans. They are free, but not 
united, the patriarchal system prevailing; the tribes are but 
loosely held together, and are often at war with one another, 
much as their Irish relatives have been. Owing to their appear- 
ance they call themselves the "brothers of the English." Their 

4 The Evolution of the Aryans, by Rudolph von Ihering, 1897. 



34 THE EVOLUTION OK MAN AND HIS MIND. 

isolation may have enabled them to preserve ancient Arya:: 
features as a survival from those remote periods. There is sig- 
nificance in Teutonic and Celtic young, especially English and 
Scandinavian, having yellow hair and blue eyes with fair com- 
plexions, however brunette they may develop later, suggesting 
that as earliest racial traits appear first in the infant the Aryan 
foundation and origin of our people may be plainly observed in 
some of our children. 

The first people known in Ireland were Formorians, of 
Turanian origin, dark, low-browed, stunted, utterly savage 
hunters and fishermen, ignorant of metals and pottery and possi- 
bly of fire, using stone hammers. Many Irish names are said to 
date from them. They appeared like Lapps. The pre-Arvan 
Ivernians, who were the possible Iberians of the British Isles, 
related to those in Spain and to the Georgians of the Caucasus, 
were forced back into the recesses of Scotland and Ireland, and 
next came the Celts in two divisions, the Gaels and Britons. The 
Cymri or Kymri, hence Cambria, was a great Celtic family, to 
which the Britons belonged and which it was claimed came from 
Asia and settled in Europe B. C. 1500. Gaelic is the northern 
branch of the Celtic language, which includes among other off- 
shoots ancient French, Irish, Erse, or Highland Scottish, and 
Manx. Then there settled in Ireland the Belgic colony of 
Firbolgs, a higher race, but short, dark and swarthy. Patricius, 
a Celt of Gaul, introduced Christianity in the fifth century, but 
not the papal kind, and invaders later were Twatha-da-Danaans 
in the east country, believed to have been large blue-eyed Scan- 
dinavian kinsmen of the Norsemen, or Danes. They were con- 
quered by the Milesians or Scoti, giving to Ireland the name of 
Scotia, by which name it was known down to the twelfth century, 
the conquered being driven into the forests and hills, from which 
they emerged with unpleasant effects upon their conquerors. In 
the ninth and tenth centuries the Danes swarmed from all the 
Baltic islands and shores. Galls means foreigners. The Fin- 
galls were white foreigners, the Norwegians, while the Dubh- 
galls were black foreigners from Jutland. A large tract north 
of Dublin is called Fingall. The Vikings settled Caithness and 
Sutherland, while Limerick, Cork, Dublin, Waterford, Wexford 



THE A RYANS, 



35 



became petty Danish kingdoms till overturned by Brian. Roman 
historians describe the Britons as a blonde race with yellow hair, 
but their descendants in Wales and Cornwall have dark com- 
plexions and brown or black hair. Ficts and Scots were the 
names of the early inhabitants. The word pict was Roman, 
meaning painted or tattooed, and the Scots called themselves 
Cruithnig, meaning tattooed, in their own language. The Scots 
were from the north of Ireland, having the Celtic name Scoti. 5 
Britons of the sixth century were restricted to the w r est of the 
island, the eastern part being under German influence. Wales, 
Ireland, Cornwall and the isle of Man are Celtic. The English, 
Irish and Scotch today are Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Celts, 
Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Low Dutch, German, French and Nor- 
man. The Anglo-Saxon and Jute invasions were practically 
wars of extermination from the sixth to the eighth centuries. 
The Celtic race is represented mainly only in Wales and in the 
west parts of Scotland and Ireland. Later the Danes and Nor- 
mans brought a slight Germanic, Scandinavian influence, but no 
marked modification of the Saxon stock. The Angles, Saxons 
and Jutes of the fifth and seventh centuries fused with the Danes. 
Though the kings grew stronger and the nobles and people grew 
further apart, their townships, hundreds and moots made and 
administered law. Anglo-Saxon is an absurd designation, simi- 
lar to other accidental names for mixed peoples. Green says that 
conquest begat the king, for in the war against the British a 
common leader was wanted, hence the sons of Henquist became 
kings in Kent, the sons of Aelle kings in Sussex, the west Saxons 
chose Cerdic, and with the king came the slave. It was by 
survival of the strongest that Northumbria dominated in England 
in the seventh century. "Over-kings" were practically emperors 
through the strongest king reducing other kings, or, what 
amounted to the same thing, the conquered kings were reduced 
to dukes and but one king was left to reign over all. After the 
English tribes had conquered the Britons in A. D. 518 they quar- 
reled and fought each other for overlordship. Aethelbert estab- 
lished supremacy over the Saxons of Middlesex and Essex, and 

5 J. Rhys, Celtic Brittain, Ch. VII. 

"John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, p. 18. 



36 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

the English of East Anglia and Mercia as far north as the 
Humber and the Trent. 

William the First introduced the French language, laws and 
customs into England in 1066. Law pleadings were changed 
back to English by Edward III in 1362. Mathew Arnold 7 says: 
"English is a vast obscure Cymric Celtic base with a vast visible 
Germanic superstructure. Its humor is a dash of Celtic impulse 
and fancy clashing with our Germanicism." This is still more 
pronounced in America, where the Celto-Germanic fusion starts 
afresh. The Goths and Vandals became Romans, the Normans 
became Saxons in England and Irish in Ireland, the Anglo- 
Saxon-Xorman conquest introduced the feudal system, DeBurghs 
became Burkes, Veres became MacSweenies, the English became 
Celticized in Ireland as Spaniards were Cubans and English 
turned to Americans, bat it is amusing that the Irish, who cling 
so tenaciously to the prejudices of their remote ancestry, consist 
of Danes, Norwegians and English, with Scotch, German and 
Jutes. Much of this hatred, however, is due to great injustice 
heaped upon those forced to live in Ireland irrespective of their 
origin and a political religion keeps them too ignorant to enable 
them to find an intelligent way out of their difficulties. 

The ecclesiastical grab game proceeded to absorb public and 
private property in England until the church, as in Spain, Italy 
and elsewhere, owned such vast areas of land that national decay 
was threatened till the secular grab came in the law of mortmain ; 
the common people are best off when the mighty, especially priest 
and king, grab from one another. 

London was supposed to have originated in a camp of Roman 
soldiers, the name meaning lake fort or Leyn-din in British, a 
piece of high ground rising out of a lake swamp and estuary 
A. D. 43. In 61 it was destroyed by Iceni, under Boadicea, when 
70,000 Roman colonists perished. In 1666 occurred the great 
fire, preceded the year before by the great plague in London. 
The streets were first lighted in 1685. A set of silly kings fell 
upon England in the seventeenth century, the Stuarts, and finally 
Cromwell stripped away much of the nonsense of royalty and 

7 On the Study of Celtic Literature, 1883, p. 64. 



THE ARYANS. 37 

the government of England now rests with parliament for all 
time. Practically a republic, calling itself a monarchy. 

A remarkable warrior ability in the Irish affords many noted 
generals in England. France, America and elsewhere, such as 
Grant. Sherman, Sheridan, Wellington, Roberts, Kitchener, 
MacMahon. The Irish have a genius for small politics, they are 
clannish, tribal and municipal, but seldom combine on larger 
issues. They have the fighting habit, and feel compelled to fight 
among themselves ; this belligerency can be ascribed to the inces- 
sant warfare of their ancestry, first with wild beasts and nature 
generally, and next with enemies who drove the original settlers 
toward the sea, and finally the Celt, himself severely hunted, 
drove these before him and mated with their survivors. So that 
the fighting, irritable, alert, quick, reckless national traits can 
thus be explained as habit which became transmitted through 
thousands of years. The sixteenth century brought religious 
differences, under Cromwell and William of Orange protestants 
were oppressive to the catholics, English trade tried to grab 
Irish patronage and subjugate their industries, they hindered 
development by atrocious legislation, and reduced the peasantry 
to serfs. At the end of the eighteenth century, says Larned, 8 
Ireland was still weakly fighting her oppressors, without judg- 
ment or enduring resolution ; finally the conscience of the English 
was aroused and the Irish were allowed some rights, of which 
they do not make the best use, occasionally as members of parlia- 
ment seeking revenge rather than sensible legislation for all. 
Rancor is often foolishly exhibited by both sides. 

There are many descendants of English Jacobites, those who 
wanted King James' family succession, and who favored the 
Stuart pretenders, and other fugitives, living in the mountains 
of Xorth Carolina and Virginia. They preserve the dialect of 
James' time. The Canadian French patois is an ancient French 
tongue. The South American states are crude, semi-barbarous, 
non-cohesive affairs, such as abounded in the middle ages, with 
the language spoken in Spain 400 years ago. California in 1847 
had a population of 6,000 Mexicans and 200,000 Indians, both of 

s Topical History. 



3$ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

whom are supplanted by the Europeans who call themselves 
Americans, and this European invasion has gradually filled all 
other parts of the United States, obliterating the savages and 
tending to the formation of a homogeneous people from widely 
separated Aryan and Semitic branches, brought together in 
America, the liberties they enjoy enabling superior development, 
which is beginning to have its effect upon the old world in many 
ways to arrest the fossilizing tendency of its thoughts and 
methods. 

The Creoles of Louisiana are mixed Spanish and French, and 
in the north the English predominate, mixed with Celtic and 
Germanic people, the original settlers from the "round heads'' 
and "cavaliers" being overwhelmed, which at one time placed 
witch-burning Puritans in Xew England and insolent, brawling 
"royalists" in Virginia and southward. A Scotch-Irish stream 
set in to America in the early part of the eighteenth century, and 
continued at the rate of sometimes twelve thousand a year from 
1729 to 1755. They settled mainly in East Pennsylvania, Mary- 
land, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky and the Missis- 
sippi valley. This stock furnished the Union with many of its 
most notable characters, among whom were Jefferson, Madison, 
Calhoun, Benton, Henry, Poe, Justice Marshall, Doctors Mc- 
Dowell and Sims, Generals Lee and Jackson, Sailor Paul Jones, 
Presidents Monroe, Taylor, Polk and Johnson. 

Mr. James M. Barnard, of Boston, told me that when my 
father, the American sculptor, brought to Italy the clay models of 
his busts of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Chief Justice Shaw and 
others, to be finished in marble, the Italian marble workers ex- 
claimed : "You have brought back the heads of the old Romans !" 
Mr. Barnard suggests that it is not unlikely that the Roman 
generals and soldiery, so long encamped in the British isles, left 
their impress upon the people, apparently strongly among the 
Scotch-Irish, from whom so many famous Americans descended. 

Long after the Celtic branch of the Aryans had skirted the 
Black and Mediterranean seas and passed northward, the swarms 
from whom the Greeks and Romans originated moved over the 
Bosphorus and Dardanelles. In the seventh century before 
Christ, Macedonia was occupied by a few scattered inland towns 



THE ARYANS. 



39 



Of rude tribes, but they were brave and pugnacious; the Persian 
yoke of the fifth century B, C. was thrown off, and in the fourth 
centun Alexander overran Persia. Greece afforded a favorable 
place for the development of civilization through early relations 
with Phoenicia and Egypt. Kingship was at first patriarchal, 
but usually gave way to a few powerful schemers, oligarchies, 
which in time were overthrown by adventurers leading the peo- 
ple, and these "tyrants" soon fell in their turn. In Athens there 
arose the purest democracy the world has ever seen, but harsh- 
ness and arrogance induced by prosperity caused the downfall of 
Athens. Statesmen who had the welfare of the people at heart 
and were capable and honest were treated with contempt by the 
ignorant, rapacious rabble, who were easily led by demagogues. 
With the change of Roman imperialism to its disguise, Greece 
reigned in the name of Rome and fought a thousand years with 
barbarians. With Constantinople as its capital, the Byzantine 
empire inherited the conjoint strength and glories of Rome, 
Greece and Macedonia, and was the bulwark of Europe against 
the oriental danger. Hallam says its history was one of crimes 
and revolutions. In the tenth century it was vicious, cowardly, 
wealthy and enlightened ; of the seventy-six emperors and five 
empresses fifteen were put to death, seven were blinded or other- 
wise mutilated, four were deposed and imprisoned in monasteries 
and ten were compelled to abdicate. Half of the whole number 
were treated with violence. 

The turmoil of the early Greeks or Hellenes appears in the 
hordes of Thessaly, pouring down upon the Dorians and driving 
them out, whereupon they drove others out in turn. Tribes from 
the lowlands expelled the Thebans, and the Dorians are supposed 
to have killed off a superior race. The Achaian civilization is 
placed between B. C. 1700 to 1400 in the southern peninsula, or 
Peloponnessus. 

Bcetia became the name of a mixed lot of races, and leagues 
between the cities were made with Thebes at the head. 

The Ionians were also driven while driving others. They 
were superior intellectually, with Athens as their chief city. The 
ascendancy of Pericles made the golden age of Athens, but in a 



40 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

war of twenty-seven years Athens was overthrown by the Pelo- 
ponnesian league. 

Monarchies, aristocracies, democracies existed side by side, 
and were often leagued together, at peace awhile, and then at war 
with each other. There were tyrannies alongside of representa- 
tive governments. Solon, B. C. 594, founded the Athenian 
democracy. The first real union of Greece came in B. C. 491, 
through the threats of Persia. *■ 

Sparta, the oligarchy, excited jealousy, and so did Athens, the 
democracy. The Greeks fought each other, class against class. 
Droughts, plagues, earthquakes, famines occurred, and the Per- 
sians fomented strife by corrupting the Greeks with money, as 
later still did the Romans in their conquests during the second 
and third centuries B. C. 

The Aryan emigrants were confirmed travelers, and carried 
with them many ancient customs, which in the course of time 
were intensified by being made sacred rites. The regular spring- 
time leaving of the young people selected for banishment became 
a religious duty with the Romans, and was known as the Ver 
Sacrum. With the increase of population and scarcity of food 
the Aryan emigration became a means of depleting the nation. 
Another custom was to get rid of the aged who encumbered the 
march by throwing them to the fishes. With Slavs and Teutons 
far into historical times, the aged were put to death. 9 The Roman 
Pontifices were bridge builders and priests because they bound the 
river gods in fetters, hence pontifical, a term preserved to this 
day for the pontiff, or high priest. Another significant survival 
occurs in the archbishop's hat, which resembles the head of a fish, 
the mitre, having come down from the headgear of the priests 
of Dagon, the fish god. The ancient pontifical office included 
throwing the aged into the river as a sacrifice, thus propitiating 
the river gods and getting rid of the old and infirm at the same 
time. Later the Romans realized the value of experience and 
insight which age acquired, and they ensured the services of old 
men for the commonwealth by a special institution, senatus, but 
reminiscences of the former custom were preserved in the sacri- 

9 Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsaltertiimer, p. 486. 



THE ARYANS. 41 

ficc oi the Argei, and in the expression senes depontani. To 

these we owe the knowledge that when crossing a stream during 
the march the old people were thrown over the bridge. 1 " The 
stone age existed at the time of the marching Romans, for their 
earliest bridges were held together by wooden nails at a time when 
the Jews and Persians used copper for nails, before their iron age 
began. 

The various warfares leading to an intermingling of tribes 
reads, especially in Mediterranean history, like descriptions of 
wave after wave of grasses, herbs and bushes growing into and 
around each others' location, exterminating, supplanting, cross- 
ing, commingling, slowly or rapidly, with a finally reached com- 
promise and modus vivendi, which may be but a new starting 
point for the incessant battle of life, alike for plants, animals and 
man. The early Italians were invaders who were constantly 
repelling invaders. As Italy first appeared in history it contained 
a number of races mainly Aryans, with Etruscan Semites on the 
west shore of the Tiber, while in the north were the Aryan 
Gauls in the valley of the Po, with pre-Aryan Ligurians and 
Aryan Venetians on the west and east coasts. All received the 
Latin stamp with the growing power of Rome. The Latin and 
Sabine tribes on the Tiber founded Rome in B. C. 776. Kindred 
tribes settled around them, but the first families jealously held 
themselves above them, and permitted them to have only a pseudo- 
citizenship, with more burdens than privileges. These plebeians 
got tired of fighting the battles and being cuffed about by the 
politicians who monopolized all the offices and the conquered 
lands, so a class struggle occurred which shaped the domestic 
politics of Rome for two centuries, B. C. 500. Dionysius, Plu- 
tarch, Livy and others credit traditions of long wars with the 
Sabines after the expulsion of the Tarquins, but Macauley says 
that modern skeptical criticism concludes the entire matter to be 
fictitious. An oligarchy cast out kings who were the early chiefs, 
and put two yearly chosen consuls in their places, thus founding 
the great Roman republic with an aristocratic constitution ; the 
plebs fought for the democratic government, and tribunes were 

"Rudolph von Ihering, The Evolution of the Aryans, Ch. III., Bk. IV. 



4^ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

elected to represent the people and secure some equality with 
patricians, who were the successful grabbers of power. Livy 
called the patricians nobilis, those who are known ; the people 
were ignobilis, persons unknown ; hence the origin of noble and 
ignoble, but they united in warring until the whole Italian penin- 
sula was under Roman rule, and then they intruded into Sicily 
and Carthage, and even to Asia Minor down to the second cen- 
tury before Christ, but corruption set in by spoils of conquest and 
streams of tribute money from three continents. Leprous with 
slavery, the middle class disappeared, freeman were supplanted 
by slaves, small farms were superseded by large slave-worked 
estates, tricks of law placed lands with the few, the common 
people degenerated into mobs, and a new aristocracy arose to 
control the government, demagogues swayed the rabble, and even 
patriots had to play the hypocrite. In the first century before 
Christ came reform undertakings foiled, social and civil wars, 
and Caesar founded an imperial autocracy with all the diseases 
which had destroyed the republic, but from thence to the fifth 
century A. D. organization worked in spite of emperors who 
were fools, fiends, or insane, while Rome was a sink of vices and 
misery, with oppression throughout the empire. The last gener- 
ation of Republican Rome witnessed the sinister strifes and 
intrigues, the machinations and corruptions of a stupendous and 
wicked game in politics that was played against one another and 
against the republic by a few daring, unscrupulous players, with 
the empire of the civilized world for the stake between them. 
Three main players were Pompeius, Crassus and Julius Csesar. 

Cicero and Cato bore a less selfish part in the contest. They 
could not realize that the former times had passed and that worse 
was to come. Christianity spread over it and gave some promise 
of regenerating the empire, but the oppressors, finding that they 
could not crush the movement, placed themselves at its head, and 
the same old oligarchy, the same old greed of power, the same 
demagogism, hypocrisy, corruption and indifTerence to the real 
welfare of the people, while pretending great solicitude for the 
souls of all, still governs as the empire was governed in its worst 
days, and, as Larned says : "When the ecclesiasticism of a 
politically fashioned church was grafted upon Christianity, it 



THE ARYANS. 



43 



then bore the evil seeds of new corruption, new discord, new 
maladies for the Roman world." The popes were practically 
emperors, who, like those in early Babylonian history, united the 
functions of both priest and king in the patesis. The old pagan 
emperors never lost a chance to" make gods of themselves. 

It was not enough for tribes of different religions to destroy 
one another, but factions would arise among those of one kind 
of belief, and from the second to the sixth century the question 
whether we should worship one god or three deluged the country 
with blood. The Arians were a Christian sect who raised this 
doubt. In Russia today the peasants kill one another over similar 
silly issues. 

On the south coast of the Mediterranean was the powerful 
Carthaginian people, who were rivals with the Romans for pos- 
session of the world. They were Phoenicians, and engaged with 
the Romans in the Punic wars, from which came the word punish, 
at intervals during the third and second centuries before Christ, 
in one of which Scipio "brought the war into Africa." after Han- 
nibal had crossed the sea and had been at the gates of Rome, but 
finally Carthage was destroyed by Rome, and its menace to the 
world ended. Europe would have been Semitized had Carthage 
prevailed. The existence of such things as mercenary armies 
in those times, ready to fight upon any side for booty, shows how 
the hope of gain may prompt wholesale treason at favorable 
periods, and the relentless extermination of the European mer- 
cenary allies of the Carthaginians by the very people for whom 
they fought when these mercenaries became too importunate for 
their pay. reminds us of the old saying that "the devil may pay 
in bad coin," and that mankind does not always have to believe 
in the justness of a cause to be able to fight for it; in fact, the 
infection of imitation and love of gain and excitement figure 
greatly in all wars at all times. 

A glance down the chronology of such old times suffices to 
show the ferocity of such periods, and in spite of it and of the 
numbers of rulers slain, how administrative systems went on with 
little disturbance or change, and how mankind lost the ability to 
ever think of any different political state ; government persisted 
in spite of individual sovereigns destroyed, for during the first 



44 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

three centuries of the Christian era violent deaths, mainly in civil 
strife, removed Caesar, Cicero, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Domi- 
tian, Commodus, Pertinax, Geta, Caracella, Elagabalus, Severus, 
Gallus, Aurelius, Gallienus, Aurelian, Probus, Numerian. 

The Roman empire occupied both sides of the Mediterranean 
sea and Asia Minor, Jerusalem being captured B. C. 63, Julius 
Caesar having invaded Gaul eight years before this. By A. D. 
300 Constantine concluded to recognize Christianity as the state 
religion, as it had become strong enough to maintain itself 
whether he fought it or not ; so, like the coach dog which 
finds out which way the horses go, he ran ahead of the procession 
and appeared to lead it ; some historical commentators declare 
that Constantine was a pagan all his life, and never gave more 
than tacit support to Christianity till near the close of his days, 
nor did the adoption of the religion of forgiveness and mercy 
make the Romans a particle less brutal, for we hear of Roman 
Christian spectators of arena combats between pagan captives, 
the old brutality persisting through change of state religion. 
Britain was conquered, but Persia stopped the progress of Roman 
arms eastward. 

The Aryan settlers and unsettlers from the north mix up with 
Roman affairs about this time and later, so they must now be 
regarded. The Germanic or Teutonic people include many 
divisions, most prominent of which were the Scandinavians com- 
prising the Danes, Norwegians and Swedes ; the other Germanic 
people are the English, Germans and Hollandish. Many tradi- 
tions point to Sweden as the region earliest occupied by Aryans; 
and Penka thinks this primitive people originated there. The 
mountains of Norway show the traces of stone-age men preced- 
ing the Aryans at a time when the contiguous Sweden was still 
beneath the sea. The Goths were the Teutons of the low German 
family, and with the Alemanni were first heard of at Rome, in the 
third century after Christ, as overrunning the country and sea 
eastward, their piratical expeditions were extended into Asia, as 
well as along the coast of Gaul. Gibbon thinks that the Goths 
and Vandals were originally one great people. The Franks were 
a powerful combination of German tribes on the Rhine, warring 
with Gaul and Britain ; thev were defeated by Constantine A. D. 



THE ARYANS. 



45 



300. who compelled several thousand captive Franks, including 
their kings Regasius and Ascarieus, to fight with wild beasts in 
the circus oi Treves, to the inexpressible delight of the Christian 
spectators. 11 Burgundy was formed about the middle of the 
fourth century, on either side of the Elbe, by a numerous Vandal 
people, swelling into a powerful kingdom; in A. D. 500 it was 
divided into two parts by kings who were brothers, one of whom 
conspired with Clovis, the Frank king, to overthrow the elder at 
Dijon, who finally captured his treacherous brother and put him 
to death. 12 Burgundy was finally captured by the Franks in 
A. D. 533, and in 1032 Germany absorbed the main country. 
The decline of Rome was attended by Yisigothic invasions, 
s of Attila the Hun, a Turanian, and the fall of the western 
Roman empire during the fifth and sixth centuries. The Ger- 
mans were merged and finally lost in the greater mass of the 
conquered, as the Normans were lost among the Saxons. In 
Lombardy the Germans made more impression. Justinian recov- 
ered Italy, and now a new terror arose from Asia in the rapidly 
growing Arabian empire, extending over Persia and Asia Minor 
and finally along the south coast of the Mediterranean sea. Its 
origin was through Mohammed, the fanatic who, when forty 
years old, claimed to be the apostle of God to root out idolatry. 
He stole much of his theology from Christian teaching. When 
fifty he began hostilities, probably through his epilepsy making 
him reckless. He had convulsions, and told of his heavenly 
visions that came to him in his fits, revelations, as shown by the 
Koran, mainly to enable him to take another wife, a scheme that 
was successfully copied by Brigham Young, the Mormon prophet 
twelve hundred years later. This Arabian empire became the 
Mohammedan, and later the Ottoman empire, but it was un- 
changed in its determination to overrun the world, its first repulse 
was at Constantinople in the seventh century, but it subjugated 
the Turks and Spain soon afterward, and while the Mohammedan 
armies were triumphantly marching northward from Spain they 
were met by Charles Martel, the memorable, who defeated them 
in a great battle between Poitiers and Tours in 732. This battle 

11 W. C. Perry, The Franks, Ch. IV. 

12 F. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders. Bk. IV., Ch. 9- 



46 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

delivered Europe from the dread of Musselmans invasions there- 
after. Among buffer regions against Moslem invasion today 
are the Balkan states and Danube river, where Greek, Bulgarian 
and Turkish villages exist side by side. 

Constantinople was finally captured from the Christians by 
the Turks in A. D. 1453. I n ^3^ Mohammed II tried to give 
an European reformation to his state, but the Jannisaries, or 
royal guards, turned against him. Six thousand of them were 
killed by the sultan's adherents, and fifteen thousand were exiled. 
The Jannisaries had previously contributed to Turkish success, 
but became a source of danger to the government, as did the 
crusading knights templar on their return to Europe, the govern- 
ment being compelled to disband them in self-defense, from 
which is learned that organizations may eventually outlive their 
usefulness and subvert the very principles they were created to 
maintain, and that reforms are often opposed most by the people 
who would be most benefited by them. 

From Norway and the Baltic isles came the Norse pirates, 
who called themselves sons of Odin, and treated the Christian 
Teutons with contempt. In the ninth century they overran 
France and sacked its cities, but were driven back by the Moham- 
medans of the Spanish peninsula. The Norse carried off thou- 
sands of captives, mainly women, from all the countries they 
invaded, suggesting that light-haired boys and black-haired girls 
in Germanic families are reversions to the Norse male blondes 
and Mediterranean female brunettes of these rough old periods. 
Between the years 986 and ion it was thought that the Norse 
Vikings made voyages to America. The Norse empire finally 
broke up during the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, but in the 
eleventh and twelfth centuries they overran South Italy and 
Sicily, sacked and burned Rome, ravaged Greece and attempted 
the conquest of the Byzantine empire. 

Austrian history is mainly that of a family, the epileptic and 
unsavory Hapsburgs, who traveled further down the road of 
degeneracy by crossing with stock that resulted in imbeciles such 
as Charles II of Spain. Some of the things Austria can glory 
in consist in base ingratitude to John of Poland, by refusing him 
help after he had rescued Vienna from the Turks, fomenting, with 



THE ARYANS. \~ 

the Spanish church, the frightful thirty years' Bohemian war, and 
assisting France to steal the liberties of Mexico. The mixture of 
races in Austria is the most remarkable in Europe. 

France descended from ancient Gaul mainly of Celtic origin. 
Its people passed through the stone age, fished and hunted as 
savages, occupied caves and rude huts, and to the fact that they 
and their descendants have been more wretched than other inhab- 
itants of Europe may be referred many national characteristics. 
The people for ages were hounded, robbed and starved, not only 
by foreign foes but by domestic priests and nobles, until the 
result could be but defective, nervous, mercurial, obsolescing, 
happy-go-lucky and hysterical generations. Their existence was 
precarious, as one day there would be enough to eat and later the 
tribes would be suffering for want of food. The pastoral state 
was the next to follow, when flocks were owned in common, but 
there was occasional famine even then. The prevailing idea in 
owning soil in common referred to one tribe of Celtic Gauls agree- 
ing to occupy land on one side of a stream and another tribe 
confine itself to another side. Some of the present day schemes 
relate to a return to such primitive methods as having land and 
goods in common ; those who favor such notions seem unaware 
that all the other conditions of savagery must accompany such 
retrograde movements. Inevitably the rascal would appear who, 
under force or pretext, would own all the land, and the people 
also. 

Succeeding this came the agricultural period, when sometimes 
crops were raised for tribes and sometimes for families. Slaves 
and women did all the work. The slaves were captives, unhappy, 
miserable, but the villagers were equally miserable, through the 
powerful gradually claiming ownership of all the land. The rich 
made the law r s for the common people to obey and carry out, and 
the Druid priests constituted the court of final appeal. These 
French ancestry were composed of Celtic Gauls mixed with Ger- 
mans and Romans. 

The colonists and slaves guarded the fields after Rome had 
Latinized the Gauls, and the corvees fell upon the few, that is, 
these peasants who were forced to work for the nobles had also 
to provide for themselves, and all this was in the name of the 



4$ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

public interest. There were constant wars, and in 1030 to 1032 
were three years of incessant rain, so that seed rotted in the 
ground and a most atrocious famine followed. Feudalism 
decayed under the communes of the eleventh and twelfth centu- 
ries, and intriguery gathered the dukedoms into the royal con- 
trol and modern France was unified but was far from happy. 
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries royalty used and 
abused the communes, breaking their charters, taking away their 
liberties, their courage and hopes, and widening class differences. 
While in England parliament grew in power, there were only 
thirteen meetings of the French assembly, the states general, in 
five hundred years. 

The royal court became a centre of corruption, full of syco- 
phants, jesters, and knaves, ruled by bigotry and frivolity. Free- 
dom of conscience or of anything was destroyed by civil war, 
oppression, banishment, bribery and massacre. One memorable 
slaughter of Huguenots was instigated by Catherine de Medici 
on what is called St. Bartholomew's night, 1572, to commemorate 
which the pope had a medal struck off, which later ecclesiasts are 
ashamed of and try to deny and suppress. Frangois I invented 
the court with its degradation of savants into clowns, its fetes, 
with courtier politicians, its immorality and dissipation. La- 
comb 13 tells of thirty thousand peasants in 1662 on the border of 
famine, without beds, clothing, furniture, reduced to skeletons, 
many women and infants being found dead on the road, with 
grass in their mouths, and villagers had not strength enough left 
to dig graves. A letter of 1683 from Abbe Grandet to the arch- 
bishop of Angers, mentions bread made of ferns and that many 
went three or four days without eating. The prisons were full 
and there was no justice, men treated those beneath them with 
ferocity. Fenelon wrote to the king: "Your people are fam- 
ished, farming is abandoned, the villages and country are depop- 
ulated, France is a desolate hospital without provisions." And 
during all this time Louis XIV reveled in gluttonous, lecherous 
and drunken splendor, the vulgar ideal of a king. 

In 1698, of 700,000 in Normandy, only 50,000 had bread, and 
most of Alengon were ferocious with suffering. La Rochelle lost 

13 Petite histoire du people francais. 



THE ARYANS. 49 

mosl of its inhabitants from inanition. In Moulins the people 
were living like beasts. Most of Riom lived on walnuts, as the 
taxes deprived them of all else. In 1740 the Archbishop Mas- 
silon wrote to Minister Fleury : "Our people are frightfully 
miserable, eating pearl barley bread which they are compelled to 
take from the mouths of their children to pay their taxes. In 
1745 the Due d'Orleans showed to Louis XV a loaf of bread 
made of ferns, and remarked: "Sire, see the food of your 
subjects." 

June 14. 1789, the bastile was torn down by the infuriated 
populace, the royal prison in which so many legal murders had 
taken place, with the merest pretense of a trial, often with none. 
Rousseau and Montesquieu influenced a development of intelli- 
gence until the middle class proclaimed an assembly to give a 
constitution to France. Dupont boldly announced that the inten- 
tion was to give a constitution based on a declaration of rights 
for all men, all times, and all countries. Lebon 14 summarizes the 
declaration of August 27, 1789, to the effect that:' "Men at birth 
are free and entitled to the same rights of liberty, property, 
security and resistance to oppression. Sovereignty is vested in 
the whole nation, and liberty consists in wdiatever does not injure 
others. The law may only forbid actions which are harmful to 
society, and is limited to the expression of the general will; it 
must be equal, for all and every citizen, either personally or 
through representatives, is entitled to assist in framing the laws." 
This declaration followed that of American independence, and 
covers much the same ground, suggesting many similar princi- 
ples. The chief difficulty of present times is to arrange means 
to prevent the foxes and wolves of politics and superstition from 
undermining the effectiveness of such declarations by finding 
ways to defeat the wishes of the people and make and administer 
the laws in their own interests, thus repeating the old game of 
grab in new ways in spite of some growth of intelligence. 

This declaration of the French people means that one set of 
men had set themselves up over all others ; that these few arro- 
gated to themselves the right to enslave, rob, oppress and destroy 
whom they wished, and these few made laws against the people 

54 Modern History of France. 



50 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

who had no voice in affairs. Old human nature inherited from 
animal nature stands ready to take advantage of the least chance 
to profit by flaws in laws, and of the impossibility of constructing 
means of protecting the rights of the people that rascals cannot 
find some way of subverting. Making a great parade and pre- 
tence of adhering to the letter of principles whose spirit they 
sneakingly avoid, when they can make anything by so doing. 

Spain and Portugal, the locations of the Inquisitions. of the 
middle ages, the Holy Office, need not be mentioned. Everyone 
has heard of how in the name of the merciful, meek and lowly 
Jesus, multitudes have been tortured to death in such countries 
to establish priestcraft more firmly in the world, destroying both 
sexes of those who dared to think, who had brains developed, 
leaving only the trucklers, the double faced and bigoted, and the 
thoughtless and insincere to inherit and transmit, with inevitable 
decadence and extinction. The descendants of the Latins, the 
Portuguese, settled in Brazil, and the Spaniards in other parts of 
South America and the West Indies, growing hostile to their 
mother countries through the need of resisting oppression, finally 
separating from them though unable to establish permanent gov- 
ernments, as they are not far enough developed mentally to do so, 
except among a few. These are instances of the splitting off of 
tribes from parent stock, and final reorganization into new na- 
tions, hostility existing between parent and child. The tendency 
now appears to be for the older country to start its colonies out 
on a self-supporting basis and to refrain from robbing them as 
the Spaniards always did their colonies. 

The great Slavonian nation of today is Russia, though its first 
rulers were Swedes. The Poles and Bohemians are the main 
western Slavs, but the Caucasus contains the greatest mixture of 
early Slavonian races with many other main families and 
tongues. The Bulgarians are also greatly mixed from remnants 
of Turanian and Aryan peoples who successively dwelt in that 
country. The Huns, a hideous Mongol people, ravaged Europe 
but were eradicated in the fifth century, and the Avars, a formid- 
able Turanian branch similar to the Huns, occupied the sixth 
century with rapine and outrage, but were finally destroyed in 
the seventh century, the remnants of Huns and Avars becoming 



TIIK ARYANS. 



5 1 



mixed with renegade and conquered Slavs. Turanian consan- 
guine marriages were bad enough, and sufficient to create a degen- 
erate line of descent, but when, added to this, children in all 
stages of immaturity, as in India of the present time, would pro- 
create, what kind of a result but an abominable one, could be 
expected ? To such causes can be ascribed the stupidity notorious 
among some Hungarian descendants of ancient Magyars. 

In 832 the Russian empire was founded by Rurik, a Scandi- 
navian, Christianity was introduced in the tenth century, and in 
1569 was the first encounter with the Turks. Then, from 1697 
to 1704, Peter the Great was active in initiating civilization, as 
Voltaire says, 15 in many ways except humane ones. Brutal, fero- 
cious, cruel, he prided himself on his dexterity in cutting off 
heads. Poland originated in the tenth century, and became 
vassal to the German emperors. Sobieski rescued Vienna from 
the Turks in 1683, an d was basely deserted by Vienna when in 
trouble himself. It has been claimed that ingratitude is a special 
Austrian trait, antedating this episode and coming down to the 
present. Poland w 7 as finally divided, Austria, Germany and 
Russia at different times snatching away parts, until poor old 
Poland is no more. In 1366 to 1405 the conquests of Timor the 
Tartar, or Tamerlane, in the orient, were extensive. He was a 
descendant of Zenghis Khan, who, with only 20,000 men, moving 
rapidly from place to place, slaughtered vast provinces and piled 
up cut-off heads in pyramids of hundreds of thousands, Cather- 
ine, the empress, 1725 to 1739, held her vulgar orgies, and 
Catherine II, 1762 to 1796, shamelessly held high carnival, such 
as the famous boodle county commissioners of Chicago tried to 
do at the county insane asylum, a comparison justified by such 
stock being closely related in animal disposition. In 1801 came 
the despotic Paul, suspicious, tyrannical, who was finally assas- 
sinated, and said to have been crazy, though not so much so as 
Ivan the Terrible, who merited his title. In 1812 came the burn- 
ing of Moscow to repel the French army under Napoleon, which 
straggled back disorganized, insane, starved, cannibalistic, a mere 
remnant of the original invaders. This epileptic criminal degen- 
erate Napoleon is adored by a lot of thoughtless admirers of 
15 History of Charles XII of Sweden, Bk. I. 



52 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

swagger, who are unable to read history aright. In 1853 an< ^ 
1854 was the Crimean war. France and Russia quarreled as a 
pretext over the custody of the holy places in Jerusalem. The 
real issue was the desire of Russia to grab Turkey. 

In an article by Andrew D. White on Tolstoy 10 , he mentions 
that after thirty-five years revisiting Moscow he found things but 
little changed, the same unkempt streets, beggars, sturdy and 
dirty, the same squalid crowds, crossing themselves before the 
images at the street corners, the same throngs of worshipers 
knocking their heads against the pavements of churches. The 
discussion of large public questions is not allowed in Russia, the 
press gives no news, and even correspondence and fireside talks 
have to be cautious. Fanaticism takes many shapes, there are 
many ghastly creeds, doctrines and sects, religious, political and 
philanthropic; one of w r hich favors the murder of new-born 
children in order to save their souls, another enjoins the most 
horrible bodily mutilations for a similar purpose ; others, still, 
would plunge the world in flames and blood for the difference of 
a phrase in a creed or a vowel in a name, or a finger more or less 
in making the sign of the cross, or of this or that garment in^a 
ritual, or that gesture in a ceremony. 

Nihilism assumes the right of any ignorant individual to sit in 
judgment upon the whole human race and condemn to death every 
other human being who may differ in opinion or position from 
him. Politically the Russians look upon the czar as representing 
God, and all the world outside of Russia as given over to Satan 
because it rejects the czar. These nihilistic and other theories are 
the outcome of original minds discouraged by the sorrows of Rus- 
sian life, developing their notions logically, but never subjecting 
them to discussion, for so doing would destroy their value as 
authority. The Russian mind, attaches no such value to reason- 
ing as other people often do. Authority is the only way of re- 
ceiving information, and as each crowd hasits own special author- 
ity there is no chance for discussion; it would be regarded as 
insulting to propose it. Such conditions afford us an idea of the 
causes of general slowness of intellectual movements in Europe 
in the middle ages, as the lack of mentality at present in Russia 
16 McClure's Magazine, April, 1901. 



THE ARYANS. 53 

reveals what was a common stage of development among our 
ancestors. 

Where for any cause one animal succeeds in leading the herd 
or pack, whether because it can reason best or is the strongest, 
the other animals follow and fear to dispute the right of leader- 
ship. Many such animals have grown so accustomed to being 
commanded by leaders who thought for them that the habit of 
deference to authority, instead of daring to reason for themselves, 
has been transmitted far down the line of descent to the middle 
ages of Europe and to the present time in large parts of Russia, 
with too great a remnant of survivors sprinkled through the so- 
called civilized world. 



CHAPTER III. 
THE SEMITES. 

While Arya was yet benighted, fully ten thousand years ago, 
there was a Semitic settlement to the south, and a people called 
Sumerians, who had developed considerable culture. Semites 
and Sumerians lived side by side and borrowed and mixed their 
civilizations, and 3200 years later Sargon, in B. C. 3800, reigned 
in Babylon, where the culture of Chaldee was still Sumerian, but 
the king and his court were Semitic, and they Semitized the older 
civilization. The Sumerian continued to be the language of reli- 
gion and law down to the days of Abraham, as the Norman lan- 
guage was that of the court in England after the conquest, while 
the Saxon was the speech of every day life. 

Sumerians and Accadians divided ancient Babylonia between 
them. The Accads invented the picture writing which after- 
wards developed into the cuneiform. The great cities of Chaldea 
were founded by them and educated people learned the extinct 
Accadian language as we do Latin. 

Hilprecht 1 unearthed 50,000 valuable records or tablets of 
Babylonian bricks at Nippur, the ancient Calneh of Genesis 10-10. 
When Abraham was about leaving Ur, the great library at Nip- 
pur was ruined by the Elamites, whose hordes were the inveterate 
enemies of the Babylonians, finally conquering Babylonia when 
Cyrus was king of Elam. Professor Hilprecht says that we can 
no longer hesitate to date the founding of the temple of Bel and 
the first settlements in Nippur between 6000 and 7000 B. C, possi- 
bly even earlier. This Calneh of the bible and Nuffer of the 
modern Arabs, is eighty miles southeast of Bagdad, in the Meso- 
potamian plain, half way between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, 
a ruined city with rubbish piles sixty feet high. The earliest fixed 

1 Recent Research in bible Lands, p. 47, and Sunday School Times, 
Dec. 1, 1900. 

54 



THE SEMITES. 55 

date in Babylonian history is that of Sargon of Akkael. Nabon- 
ides, the royal antiqarian of Babylonia, made a record of dynas- 
ties, through his excavations, extending back 3200 years earlier. 
Babylon was the first seat of civilization, and Egypt derived its 
civilization thence. Four thousand years B. C. there was inter- 
course between Egypt and Babylonia, the civilization of which 
reached Tyre, Sidon and Carthage. Its arts and business ideas 
spread over the world when Aiwa was nothing, and the Babylo- 
nian empire was old when Rome was rising. 

Philologists group a Semitic speech family as consisting of 
I. Hebrew and Phoenician; II. Aramiac ; III. Assyrian and 
Bablyonian ; IV. Arabian ; V. South Arabian, and VI. Ethi- 
opian, but this similarity of language does not constitute race nor 
a common origin. The term Semitic race was an unfortunately 
incorrect invention of Eichhorn. 

The absence of wood and stone made brick the material of 
Babylonian superioity. Artificial lakes and canals, agriculture, 
navigation, astronomy, commerce, with gold and silver money, 
were theirs. Their rich soil, large river, the brick and the ship 
built up ancient Babylonia, and the writing tablet made trade 
secure. When Greece and Rome developed a high civilization 
derived from Babylon, the Teutons and Slavs were low in the 
scale of progress. Phoenicians were the medium through which 
Babylon taught the Aryans, who are really the heirs of the Sem- 
ites, and even the plastic art of Egypt and later countries is from 
Babylon. In Sargon's time running writing, cursive script, had 
taken the place of hieroglyphics and pictographs, and with Sargon 
began the Semitic age. The Egyptian conquest partitioned Meso- 
potamia in 1600 B C, and vassal Arabs of Egypt sat upon the 
Babylonian throne. Upper Babylonia was too far from Egypt, 
and so was able to remain independent. Mesopotamia was re- 
united by the overthrow of Egyptian control in 1400 B. C, but 
though Babylon had her own kings, they were satraps of Assyria, 
whose capital was at Nineveh. 

The inventors of the cuneiform system of writing had been a 
people who preceded the Semites in the occupation of Babylonia 
and who spoke an agglutinative language utterly differing from 
their Semitic successors. These Akkadians left much literature 



56 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

which was highly prized by the Semitic Babylonians and Assyr- 
ans. 2 The Semitic scribes improved upon the Sumerian writing. 
The Chaldeans settled at the mouth of the Euphrates, a fertile re- 
gion like the Nile. In 2,160 years 46 miles of land have formed 
between the Persian gulf and the former mouth of the river, and 
Eridu, a seaport town dating to 6500 B. C, is now 130 miles in- 
land from the present coast. Nippur still farther inland on a 
canal between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, was the chief 
sanctuary and religious center of the civilized world. Nippur, Ur 
and Eridu were the three earliest cities of ancient Babylon. The 
Sumerians preceded the Semites in city building. The Babylon- 
ians were a mixture of races, according to Berosus, the Chaldean 
historian, and their country was won from the sea as prevailing 
accounts stated, which would also parallel the spread of the Aryan 
race down the Oxus river as its valleys were created by the fall 
of the ancient ocean. 

The rule of Sargon extended to the island of Cyprus, and his 
people, a compound of Sumerians, Semites and Elamites, left en- 
during traces on West Asia and the world through the inclination 
races have to intermix. Racial intermarriages produce superior 
offspring often, though it would be out of our power to affirm 
that any race has not mixed with another at some time. 

Irrigation for agriculture necessitated engineering and the 
nearness to the sea gave impetus to trade w r ith southern Arabia 
and Egypt, so there were surveyors, merchants arid sailors as 
well as farmers. 

The absence of stone from the country and the expense of 
papyrus led to writing upon clay tablets which were often baked 
to make the record permanent. Originally these inscriptions were 
mere pictures of objects imperfectly conveying their meaning, 
but these in time changed into wedge shaped marks in regular 
lines from right to left; what were formerly curves in the pictures - 
were changed to angles and finally the writing was simplified by 
omitting as many marks as possible, and in this way the Baby- 
lonian writing evolved. These cuneiform characters were as nu- 
merous as words and were committed to memory by the children 
of that day. They were also taught to use dictionaries, grammars, 

'A. H. Sayce, Fresh Lights from the Ancient Monuments, Ch. I. 



THE SEMITES. 57 

reading books, mostly Sumerian, exercises, history and geogra- 
phy, poetry and prose. A superstitious reverence for names was 
drilled into the people at all ages. 

The fertility of Babylonian soil was such that grain returned 
300 fold when planted. Wheat and barley with other cereals were 
raised in great abundance. The patriarchal and matriarchal prin- 
ciples struggled for supremacy, in which the father and mother 
took precedence. 

Sarzec found 32,000 tablets in regular order in the southern 
part of Chaldea where they had been placed about B. C. 2700. 
Some of the tablets had writing so small that it required a micro- 
scope to read the characters. In the British Museum is a magni- 
fying glass found by Layard at Xinevah and it was therefore pre- 
sumed that the Assyrians sometimes used such means of reading 
and inscribing minute writing. But this rude instrument does 
not indicate much optical knowledge or skill in those far off times. 

A lot of false sciences existed in those days and the records 
upturned and deciphered pertain to history, chronology, geogra- 
phy, law, private and public correspondence, despatches from gen- 
erals, royal proclamations, lists .of bears, birds, insects, stones, 
stars, and other natural science matters, writings upon philology, 
astrology, theology, omens, poems, with deeds, contracts, legal de- 
cisions, inventories, stored in ancient libraries of Assyria and 
Babylonia. The museum of the University of Pennsylvania con- 
tains many of these records and among them are 730 tablets found 
by the Peters and Hilprecht expedition at Nippur over the site of 
the former royal library, which proved to be the business doc- 
uments of some merchants named Marashu Sons, shrewd Sem- 
ites, subjects of Artaxerxes and Darius II, during the fifty years 
between B. C. 464 and later. Their clients were Semites, Per- 
sians, Greeks, Medes, Judaens, Sabaens, Edomites and oth- 
ers. The boundary between Babylon and Assyria dates B. 
C. 1450, and Shalmaneser I reigned about B. C. 1300. 
The first known priest-king or patesis of Asshur is assigned 
to B. C. 1800. The Assyrians excelled in the ferocities 
of war but not in the arts of peace. 3 Assyrian chro- 
nology is definitely settled as between B. C. 1330 to B. C. 

3 Z. A. Rogozin, Medea, Babylonia and Persia, 1898. 



5& THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

620. 4 The Assyrian then rose to pre-eminence in western 
Asia till in after centuries they yielded to the new Babylonian 
regime founded by the Chaldeans from the shores of the Persian 
gulf. Babylon seemed to have recovered the upper hand from B. 
C. 1060 to 1020, but the second Assyrian empire regained control 
and armies overran the region from the Caspian to the Persian 
gulf, and from the tenth to the seventh centuries B. C. the Assyr- 
ian supremacy was vast and formidable and then suddenly ceased 
through the treachery of a general, who was sent to quell a Baby- 
lonian insurrection, making himself king of Babylon and conspir- 
ing with his former enemies to overthrow Assyria. 

The Persians, who must have been mixed Aryans and Sem- 
ites, were first mentioned by Assyrian kings in the middle of the 
ninth century B. C. They were found in southwest Armenia in 
close contact with the Medes. The Persian empire began about 

B. C. 550. The Medes and the Babylonians combined in the sev- 
enth century B. C. to overthrow the Assyrian power. 5 Cyrus the 
Great who was king of Elam B. C. 549, became king of Persia in 
546 by the overthrow of Babylonia, Media, Persia and Lydia. 
The Elamites had previously, thirty to twenty-two centuries B. 

C, destroyed Babylonia. 

According to Simcox Akkad was non- Semite and the lan- 
guage had affinities with the Chinese, and the speech of the found- 
ers, the Sumerians, of the Mesopotamia!! civilization was akin to 
that of the Turks, an intimation that the non-Aryans who pre- 
ceded the Babylonians were Turanians. The mixed Sumerian 
and Semite language was brought to the Mediterranean shores 
and to Egypt in the earliest days of Egyptian history. The Eu- 
phrates like the Nile had annual inundations and occasionally it 
would appear that many of the overflows were like those of the 
Oxus of old and the Yellow river of China of the present day, 
sweeping whole populations before them. The empire of Sargon 
of Akkad extended from the Persian gulf to the Mediterranean, 
beyond this the first dynasty of Ur had to keep up perpetual war- 
fare with the Semitic tribes of northern Arabia, Ki-sawa, the 
''land of the hordes," as it was termed by the Sumerians. 

4 E. A. W. Budge. Babylonian Life and History, Ch. III. 
? L. von Ranke. Universal Historv, Ch. III. 



THE SEMITES. 59 

The first Egyptian dynasty is placed at B. C. 4777 and the 
nineteenth at B. C. 1327 by Petrie. The culture of primitive 
Egypt is derived from Chaldea and the language of Egypt is a 
Babylonian mixture of Sumerian and Semitic. 6 There are wall 
paintings along the Nile valley representing antique races of 
brown Copts, black negroes and white people, very likely the 
founders of the Egyptian peasantry who have reverted to the 
characteristics of the least intelligent of their ancestry. At Kop- 
tos on the Nile the ruins date back to B. C. 5000, with mention of 
a period 500 years earlier. Mud deposits at the mouth of the 
Nile are calculated as dating back to 8,000 years ago. Cretan ex- 
plorations show intercourse with Egypt about 2000 B. C, with 
clay tablets like those of Babylonia, but with two kinds of script, 
one of which is linear and the other is half pictorial. The money 
of ancient Egypt resembles the ring money of the ancient Baby- 
lonians and that which was current among the Celts in Ireland 
as late as the twelfth century after Christ, and similar to what is 
still in circulation in the interior of Africa. Each people may 
have originated the ring money separately, in some few cases 
learning the idea from others. 

Simcox speaks of Egypt, Babylonia and China as the three 
great seats of archaic civilization 7 and mentions the fertility of 
the soil, abundance of food, ancient and modern abuses, mainly 
such as occur everywhere in the weak being oppressed by the 
strong. Agriculture and cattle farming were highly developed, 
the administration being through stewards. The Egyptians had 
the institution of slavery as well as had other nations, the origin 
being in captives and their descendents being compelled to work 
for their captors. Practically the entire population was enslaved 
for the ruling classes absorbed the labor of the peasants without 
recompense, and these miserable creatures submitted to endless 
abuse ; starved, naked, beaten, murdered, they were set gigantic 
tasks by their masters. The great temple of Karnak and the pyr- 
amids designed by Babylonian engineers for the Egyptian priests 
and kings were piled up by brute strength ; thousands of human 

'A. H. Sayce, Recent Discoveries in Babylon, Contemporary Review, 

Jan., 1897. 
7 E. J. Simcox, Primitive Civilization, 1894. 



60 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

cattle pulled and pushed stones up inclined planes of earth hills 
they had previously built and afterwards removed ; this simple 
explanation disposing of the mystery of these vast constructions, 
none of which is as wonderful as our modern engineering or ar- 
chitectural works except to the emotional unreasoning worship- 
ers of things ancient merely because they are ancient, such as 
•Piazzi Smyth and his class. The Egyptian rulers were anxious 
to save their souls by preserving their bodies till the judgment 
day, the superstition being that the soul was lost if the body de- 
cayed. It mattered nothing to the kings how many common souls 
were destroyed in saving their royal carcasses, and the spirit of 
this sort of "other-worldliness" prevails today. Another sur- 
vival from such crude times is the idea that God is, a big man, 
the Egyptian gods and kings were all sculptured as giants while 
the common people were represented by small figures. The mis- 
ery of the lower classes of Egypt is detailed by Maspero. 8 Brit- 
ish Museum papyri dating to the thirteenth century B. C. con- 
tain caricatures of Rameses III who was not liked by the intelli- 
gent classes for his vanity, egotism and lack of tact. He had 
placed a vainglorius record of his victories over people south, 
east and west. A caricature represents him as the king of rats 
in a chariot drawn by dogs, scaring a fortress full of cats who beg 
for mercy, a sarcastic reminder of his lying boasts of having con- 
quered stronger and better races. 

W. M. Flinders Petrie judges from the pictures of ancient men 
and women with full foreheads and aquiline noses that in the 
early man of Egypt we had to deal with an European race more 
or less mixed with the negro. He. says that there are 9,000 years 
unbroken in chains of events in Egyptian history and yet we are 
far from the beginning. There are traces that civilization must 
have come in from another country with copper and fine work in 
flint and stone and good pottery. In the earliest graves figures of 
a race of the bushmen type were found similar to those found 
both in France and Malta suggesting that the race may have ex- 
tended over Africa into Europe. There were figures of captured 
women from the earlier race which was probably paleolithic. The 
climate was totally different from what it is today, and the rain- 

8 Dawn of Civilization, p. 339. 



THE SEMITES. 6l 

fall fertilized what is now a desert, and animals of which all trace 
is Lost inhabited the country. Petrie places the age of Abraham 
after the XII dynasty of the kings of Egypt. Pottery of the 
Greek pattern was found in the tombs of Egyptian kings of the 
first dynasty, which proves civilization on both shores of the Med- 
iterranean at the same time. The Exodus was during the XIX 
dynasty and Shishah early in Jewish monarchy in the XXII dy- 
nasty of Egypt. Among the important dates we have B. C. 4777 
for the first and B. C. 1327 for the nineteenth dynasty. Early 
records at Koptos B. C. 5500; Crete traded with Egypt in B. C. 
2000; the Egyptian conquest of Mesopotamia B. C. 1600; Ra- 
meses II B. C. 1330: Egyptian conquest of Persia B. C. 525. 
Brugsch dates the founding of the great pyramids of the Hyksos 
in Egypt at B. C. 2200 to 1700, and the period of greatest im- 
perial power in Egypt as B. C. 1750 to 1250. 

At present the lower classes in Egypt are increasing at a rapid 
rate under the English protection. The improvements introduced 
into Egypt by the English government enables a larger population 
to live, the new dams of the Nile save water to fertilize wide 
plains and the average peasant is enabled to have more wives and 
cigarettes as well as better food in abundance. Thus human 
vermin increase under favorable circumstances, but bad times may 
kill off millions of these simple folk, as when famine wipes out 
hosts in India and the Yellow river changes its course through a 
populous country and drowns out villages and plains full of mon- 
gols, and with animal shortsightedness the Chinese chop off all 
the trees on a mountain range causing a failure of the rains and 
several million pig-tailed lice perish as ants and rats do from mis- 
haps of nature. 

The Hebrews are the first mentioned as living near the Baby- 
lonians and were classed with them as Semites because of sim- 
ilarity of language. They were pastoral in the fertile plains of 
Goshen and occupied the north of Egypt under Pharoah, but they 
mingled little w T ith others and kept their own Israelitish manners 
and customs, and like every other race believed in their own su- 
periority. They traded for ages and had a written language and 
resembled the Assyrians in many ways. They never developed 
as farmers or soldiers nor sailors, hence they were easily con- 



62 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

quered and scattered, but they had great mercantile ability. S. L. 
Clemens suggested that their superiority in trade of both honest 
and dishonest kinds excited the envy of all their neighbors and 
accounted for their being in disfavor and the pretexts, religious 
and otherwise, to rob them. The hostility and persecutions they 
encountered date further back than the Christian era. Even 
where they mixed with other races the Jewish peculiarities re- 
mained prominent. Oppenheim 9 shows that in the modern Jews 
there are the traces of their wanderings in resemblances to the 
tribes with which they mixed, Slav, Teuton, Iberian, etc., "while 
in the streets of New York one may easily recognize skulls and 
lineaments as clearly ancient Assyrian as one can possibly hope 
to find." 

The Lydians who were conquered by Greece in B. C. iooo 
were an allied Semitic people of the west coast of Asia Minor. 
Modern approximate dates for Hebrew chronology are Mesopo- 
tamian pastoral tribes B. C. 7000; Abraham B. C. 2000; exodus 
from Egypt 1200; David king of Hebrews 1000; Saul king 1055 > 
Solomon king 933 ; Jerusalem captured by Egypt 949 ; Hosea king 
734 ; Nebuchadnezzar takes Jerusalem 597. 

Phoenicians as far back as B. C. 3000 occupied Greece and 
the Aegean islands. Their civilization was from Egypt and Baby- 
lonia. 10 They were mentioned by Herodotus and Pliny with the 
Canaanites at about B. C. 2400. Amorites overthrew the Hittites 
B. C. 1300 and a reaction took place in the cities of Phoenicia. 
Slave dealing, money trading and mining were the chief indus- 
tries, which did not prove to be moralizing influences. 11 Phoenicia 
became subject to Assyria and Babylon B. C. 850 to 538. The 
Etruscans were supposed to have been Phoenicians like those of 
Carthage and Marseilles who were driven from their original 
home. 12 About B. C. 2000 Semitic immigrants from the East be- 
gan to supplant the Phoenicians in Syria. Rawlinson says that 
the ''father of history" assigned their origin to the Persian gulf, 

9 The Development of the Child, p. 69. 

10 D. G. Hogarth, Authority and Archaeology. 

11 Rawlinson, History of Phoenicia, Ch. XIV. 

12 F. Haverfield, Authority and Archaeology, p. 305. 



THE SEMITES. 63 

and Renan also derives them from this region. 18 Their migration 
may have required a century. Rawlinson includes a period from 
the fourteenth to the fourth century B. C. when they dwelt in 
Syria during which all Mediterranean and eastern countries came 
in contact with them ; they were hardy mariners who visited all 
shores between India, Spain and Britain, which last named place 
they discovered. Their religious rites were cruel and licentious 
and like the early Norsemen they were often pirates. It need not 
be supposed that the Druids and Norse learned their cruelties 
from their Phoenician visitors for such traits are common herit- 
ages of all mankind from our animal ancestry, remaining with us 
in all degrees of intensity. 

13 Histoire des langues semitique, II., 2, p. 183. 



CHAPTER IV. 
THE MIDDLE AGES. 

When history repeats itself it is usually because the same old 
causes operate, the same old animal ferocity, greed or fear during 
age after age give us the same old results, and while modern 
nations are actuated largely by the motives of their ancestry in 
disguised, refined and complicated ways, it seldom occurs to us 
to analyze events on the basis of what is inherited from not only 
primitive, savage people, but from even more remote predatory 
and hunted animals. The behavior of tribes of barbarians 
closely copies that of a wilderness full of apes, and civilized 
nations too often are barbarous in their notions and doings, 
especially when checks upon actions are removed. The Middle 
ages were not worse than preceding periods but there have come 
down to us records from those times less confused with fairy 
yarns, such as abounded in the tales of earlier days when few 
knew how to write or even observe properly. Stripping away 
the exaggeration and glamor associated with the Roman achieve- 
ments we can have a more intelligent grasp of such and other 
events through glancing at the caperings of troops of monkeys 
or by fancying what great bands of the anthropoid apes, like 
the gorilla or chimpanzee, would do were they more gregarious. 
Many wild beasts follow the leader who is most powerful. Packs 
of wolves can be readily divided between the strong leader and 
the passive led, with an intermediate few who are jealous of the 
leader and who conspire to destroy him. Gibbon begins his 
renowned history with the beastly antics of the degenerate son 
of the complaisant Marcus Aurelius and dissolute Faustina. 
This son, Commodus, after inexpressible excesses, was poisoned 
by conspirators, and the attempted reforms of Pertinex infuriated 
the corrupt soldiery. They loved war, rapine and license, the 
plunder of provinces, the bribes of officers, the capture of matrons 

64 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 65 

and maidens. After killing- Pertinex the hundred thousand 
soldiers held in subjection ten milions of unarmed people. A 
standing army places any nation at the mercy of a general. There 
are two factors, however, that operate more in modern times to 
annul this danger, one is the higher animus of the average 
general rendering him more likely to be loyal, and the other 
is the lifted plane of intelligence of the people, until as was re- 
cently attempted, conspiracies to exploit honors and prize money 
by a naval and war office ring were only partially successful. 
The Pretorian guard of the Rome of the second Christian cen- 
tury with its sixteen thousand sufficed to overawe the four million 
people, the passive citizens of Rome, and through the senate to 
control an empire of a hundred and fifty million. The soldiers 
sold the throne to the highest bidder, Julian, but the absent vic- 
torious armies had to be heard from. Severus with twenty 
thousand men from across the Adriatic, Clodius Albinus with a 
similar force in Britain, and Pescennius Niger with an army 
greater than both, in Syria, each declared an emperor and 
marched to Rome to enthrone him. Severus outwitted them 
all, after battles in which kindred were slain by thousands ; on 
his deathbed he advised his sons to enrich the soldiers at any price 
and to treat the rest of the subjects as ciphers. Caracella killed 
his brother Geta and twenty thousand of his friends and was 
murdered in his turn by a soldier, whereupon the army selected 
a new emperor, Macrinus, this being the method of divine choice 
of rulers. Upon his attempting to make the least change for 
economy sake in army affairs he was promptly removed by death, 
as promptly as an honest office holder would be suppressed today 
by Tammany. Elagabalus, the high priest of the sun, the pon- 
tifex maximus and emperor, with his gorgeous tiara entered 
Rome, conspiring with the soldiers to be divinely selected, and 
rioted in imperial wealth and power with grossest dissoluteness. 
Rome sickened of his beastliness and after killing him the senate 
passed a decree consigning his name to eternal infamy. The 
guard elected Alexander Severus, who tried to make many 
changes for the better, but the soldiers expressed their dislike of 
reforms by killing multitudes to teach the new emperor his place, 
and finally killing him they raised the giant baboon Maximin 



66 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

over themselves. He robbed his own temples in his greed and 
even his rotten priests and army could not bear his cruelties, and 
as he was marching to quell a revolt in Rome the soldiers killed 
him and accepted the two rulers named by the senate, but soon 
killed them off and set up Gordian, who was poisoned by Philip, 
a general who conspired to take his place, but the Danube army 
repudiated this choice of the Persian army and elected Marinus, 
one of their own generals. Philip sent Decius to use his personal 
influence with the Danube army in his behalf, but that army com- 
pelled Decius to accept the post of emperor and repudiated Mar- 
inus. Decius routed the army of Philip and cut his head off. 
The Pretorian guard welcomed the new sovereign who had so 
many legions behind him. In A. D. 250 the northern barbarians 
defeated the Roman armies and the senate chose two emperors 
on the death of Decius, one to remain at Rome as civil governor 
while Gallus was to be military emperor ; the civil governor died 
suddenly, Gallus was murdered by the senate, and it appointed 
Emelianus. The Roman empire at this time encircled the Med- 
iterranean sea. Emelianus was killed by his soldiers and Va- 
lerian was selected and a march made to repel the Persian in- 
vasion while his son Gallienus tried to keep out the Franks who 
overran the country : Valerian was killed by the Persians, Gal- 
lienus was inefficient and cruel and was finally assassinated. The 
population of Rome decreased one-half by wars, pestilence and 
famine, while different bands of the army were incessantly elect- 
ing new emperors, thirty candidates at one time being fought 
over. Claudius succeeded Gallienus and died trying to head off 
the Goths; Aurelian, his successor, vanquished them, but he was 
killed by his own officers. For two centuries out of a great 
number of emperors only three or four died a natural death, the 
good and bad alike were doomed to a. bloody end. The eight 
months when Rome was without an emperor were the best the 
city had at that period. Tacitus was compelled to be emperor 
and was murdered by his soldiers ; Probus was chosen and was 
also killed by mutineers and the army elected Cams and killed 
him, then selected Carinus and Numerian, the two sons of Carus, 
as emperors. Numerian died and Diocletian, a slave who suc- 
ceeded Carinus at Rome, set out to fight Diocletian and was killed 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 67 

by a general whose wife Carinus had seduced. Diocletian selected 
Maximian to help him, Diocletian to be the head and Maximian 
the sword. They abdicated and at the time of Constantine there 
were six emperors. The east provinces took Licinus and the 
west Constantine, who put Licinus and 34,000 of his soldiers to 
death. Constantine being sole emperor concluded to fortify 
himself by making the new Christianity the state religion, but 
he was not baptized in that faith till on his deathbed. His three 
dissolute sons divided the country between them, barbarians 
nocked from all quarters upon the Roman garrisons, Picts and 
Scots rushed down upon Britain, Gothic tribes ravaged the Rhine 
and the dynasty of the Goths in Rome followed. The new church 
copied the former civil power in its organization, bishops and 
priests filling the places of mayors and aldermen, the bishop of 
Rome being the highest governor, assuming the title of supreme 
pontiff or pontifex maximus, the great bridge priest who sacri- 
ficed to the river gods ; later the term pope was adopted, which 
is the Italian papa, the Greek church calling all their priests by 
that name, the equivalent of father. The first three hundred 
years or more of the Christian era may be said to have belonged 
to pagan Rome when Jupiter was the chief god, then comes a 
thousand years in which the Christian empire went to pieces and 
would have been forever ended but for the barbarians of the 
north having adopted the ideas of Rome after those ideas no 
longer influenced the place of their birth. So during the thou- 
sand years when both pagan and papal Rome sank to insignifi- 
cance the Frankish kingdom grew in what are now* France and 
Germany, and Charlemagne, the Frank, became supreme in Eu- 
rope. Pope Leo III was driven from Rome by its citizens and 
fled to the Franks for aid, and was restored to his pontifical chair 
by Charlemagne who, in the year 800, was rewarded with the 
title of emperor of Romans, adding the extra head to what is now 
the German eagle ensign. The emperor Charlemagne ruling 
while the pope confined his control to spiritual affairs, an arrange- 
ment which never lasted with succeeding governments any longer 
than priest or king, one or the other, could grab both offices. 



68 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

George Burton Adams 1 begins his summary of the middle 
ages at the time of the fall of the Western Roman empire because 
it is the point where all the main forces of our present civiliza- 
tion are at last together on the stage, and he closes with the 
reformation because it is the event that brought the middle ages 
to a close. Through Rome learning from Greece and that coun- 
try in turn from Egypt and Phoenicia, the best of Semitic thought 
and art came into Europe. Rome contributed her science of law 
and government and furnished the imperial church, and when 
German vigor was added to all it is apparent that our modern 
civilization comes from Greece, Rome, Judea and Germany- 
There was but little gain in civilization between the fourth and 
fourteenth centuries, the work of the middle ages was assimila- 
tion, as an animal gorges before waking to new activities, or 
fallow ground prepares for productiveness. The people were 
barbarians without state or nation, the darkness of ignorance 
made anarchy and insecurity everywhere. The notions that had 
gone forth from Rome gradually did their work, especially the 
arrogant idea that Rome was destined to rule the world, that 
the ancient gods would triumph, and this conceit outlasted ancient 
Rome, and was resurrected in Christian Rome and spread north- 
ward as Rome was again perishing, and the hypnotic suggestion,, 
the constant iteration, the oft told tradition did its work in con- 
nection with other propitious matters, so the Holy Roman empire 
was created with fire and sword. Middle age thought and reason 
could not conceive of empire apart from Rome, at least it satisfied 
the poor intellects of the time and explained the operations of 
Charlemagne. At first the priests were mere teachers and ex- 
horters, many of them following common trades, but they grew 
in importance with success and set themselves up as mediators 
-between God and men, and found the new business profitable. 
Of course the profession increased, as easily earned rewards 
attract those who would escape work, though there were many 
sincere priests in all ages and religions. Membership in the- 
church came to be regarded as necessary to reach heaven, faith 
did not count for so much as ceremonies and gifts. A politicaL 

1 Mediaeval Civilization. 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 69 

organization was the most natural so the monarchial church arose, 
and with it came the old spirit of conquest. When the Yisi- 
gothic king sacked Rome in 410 heathenism perished and its sup- 
porters were penniless, the pope became important, the rise of 
the Carolingian family in France and its alliance with the papacy 
was another step, and some confiscated lands began its temporal 
power. It seemed necessary to the profit sharers in the new 
religious organization to prove a far off divine origin for their 
church, so what are known as the pseudo-Isidorian decretals were 
forged to deceive the people into thinking that the church had 
not grown up naturally from small beginnings, as things every- 
where usually do. They were gotten up in the eighth century 
to support the papal claims to the right to rule the world ; one 
paper was a pretended edict of Constantine granting to the pope 
sovereignty over the west, and there were fabricated letters and 
early papal decrees, and these forgeries are full of mistakes about 
historical facts and dates, depending upon the ignorance of the 
people at that time to escape detection. 

In pagan Rome the religious officials consisted in six augurs, 
who claimed to be able to tell events by observing the way that 
birds would fly, and the auspices ascertained the will of the gods 
regarding undertakings by divination. The most interesting and 
finally most important official grew out of the five bridge builders 
or pontifices who built, or destroyed in case of invasion, the 
bridge over the Tiber. 

These pontifices were the Roman engineers who understood 
numbers and measures so that they were employed to calculate 
the calendar, proclaiming the time of the new and full moon, the 
days of festivals, such as the shortest day of the year, for which 
finally Christmas and New Year's day were substituted, though 
such days are merely near to the shortest day. The pontifices 
saw that judicial and religious acts took place at the right time 
and gradually they acquired control of Roman worship. The 
president of their college was called the pontifex maximus, and 
that is the term applied to the Roman pope. These bridge 
builders called their knowledge "the sum of all that was divine 
and human." Let a parcel of functionaries have control of the 
little knowledge of their time and like the coal barons of America 



70 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

they squeeze the common people out of all that their "corner" 
enables them. 

Monasteries were founded upon the idea that sure rewards in 
heaven would follow upon giving up the world and living in 
seclusion and privation, often the monasteries became mere gar- 
risons to enable newly acquired lands to be held in subjection. 
Civilization owes much to the monks for they often taught farm- 
ing to the barbarous people and started manufactures among 
them, the poor were helped, and monastery walls were frequently 
places of refuge against war and oppression. They were often 
the sole places where order and quiet survived. Many books 
were preserved in the monastic libraries which must otherwise 
have been lost, and many were the manuscripts laboriously copied 
by monks, which they frequently could not understand. Schools 
were sometimes connected with monasteries and the renewed 
learning and science of Europe took its first feeble steps under 
the guidance of the monks. Falling inevitably into corruption 
the system was as often purified by earnest reformers who, of 
course, were made to feel the penalty of having tried to benefit 
their fellow men. And, as Adams says : "Very often during 
these centuries of darkness there lived on under the sackcloth of 
the monk, after they seemed driven from every other abode, the 
principles of a genuine Christianity, the practice of its real virtues 
and the living of its real life." 

Rome could be likened to a pot into which ideas from many 
lands were put to be cooked and eaten by later guests, often the 
ideas were half digested, but they served to keep alive intellectu- 
ality which would have perished otherwise. It has also been 
claimed that had Christianity remained the pure and spiritual 
religion of its early days it would have been swept out of exist- 
ence by the barbarians, but Christianity had already become cor- 
rupted before the influence of the barbarian races began to be 
felt, it may be said to have sunk to the level of savage compre- 
hension, the ceremonies, knaveries, appeals to fear, sales of 
forgiveness, etc., being what simple intelligences think they can 
understand, but while a system can become rotten often there are 
votaries w T ho are sincere and who long to make things better, 
the priest was often a protecting and restraining power for good, 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 7 I 

while those in charge of the general policies of the church were 
utterly unprincipled ; ecclesiasticism was not Christian, it was 
Romanism of the traditional kind ; when most corrupt the church 
hypocritically but usefully held up in theory the standard of mor- 
ality, which its bishops and many of its priests did not practice. 
The notion gradually gained ground that the moral law was 
binding upon all, though to this day the anthropoids think that 
royalty and high church dignitaries are exempt. From out of 
the middle ages came the idea that the individual could be free, 
and that the state is for the people, contrasted with the older 
notion that the individual existed only for the state ; the equality 
of all men was discussed while slavery w r as favorably regarded 
because intelligence had not developed sufficiently to oppose it, 
nor did the church as such put forth any of these advanced 
thoughts, it was either here and there that some earnest priest 
exceeded his authority and dared to stand up for truth as he saw 
it, and probably be punished for his pains, or outside of the 
church ideas would grow often in spite of clerical opposition, and 
finally when no longer possible to oppose them they would be 
adopted in some form and then the claim be made that the church 
had originated them. This has been the case with monogamy, 
anti-slavery, morality in general, when in reality all such matters 
were forced upon church teachings often with the utmost diffi- 
culty. 

The Goths and Lombards were Christians before entering 
Roman territory, but they were Arian Christians, a sort of Uni- 
tarian belief, regarded as heresy by catholics ; the Franks were 
rapidly converted to Christianity, but the Saxons required a 
century and a half. These savages brought into Rome their free 
political governments, their public assemblies for the making of 
laws in which every freeman had an equal voice, and it was long 
centuries before Roman influence corrupted and ruined the ideas 
of German liberty, but in Saxon England those germs of liberty 
grew into the free government which America inherited and 
which the. world is gradually being taught. The present Ger- 
mans have a Romanized system of jurisprudence while England 
derived her laws from ancient uncorrupted Germanic principles. 



72 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

The Merovingian kings, the sons of Clovis, fought among 
themselves. With the rise of the Carolingians and the splitting 
of the Frankish kingdom, Austrasia widened into the Germany 
of later history and Neustria grew into France. Merovingian 
became a reproach as equivalent to lazy and worthless, and 
Charles Martel and his grandson Charlemagne founded the Car- 
lovingian rule. What was known as the Iconoclastic controversy 
occurred through the patriarch John removing pictures from the 
church of St. Sophia in 712, Constantine opposed this while Leo 
in 726 made an edict commanding all images except the cross to 
be taken out of the churches. As the images brought money to 
the priests and monks they induced the people to revolt. Greg- 
ory the first and second led the revolts, and massacres followed. 
The church was split between those who worshiped and those 
who destroyed images. Leo IV being poisoned by his wife in 
780, images triumphed. A certain class took middle ground to 
retain images, but not to w r orship them. Charlemagne was not 
pleased with the Nicene decrees restoring images, so in 790 he 
caused books to be written against them, but the pontiff did not 
favor his ideas. In 794 Charlemagne called a council of 300 
bishops at Frankfort on the Maine and the council passed a rule 
forbidding the worship of images. 

The more intelligent church people nowadays say those im- 
ages are merely emblems and are not worshiped, but the ignorant 
bulk of the devout do not understand such refined notions. 

Communication was difficult and far off lords did not even 
know who their kings were at times, so centralization was imper- 
fect. Security was the first thing to maintain and Charlemagne 
arose to give expression to the desire for unity and peace in 
Europe He tried to revive learning and introduce general edu- 
cation, but the times were not suitable and even his own ideas 
were the narrow ones of the period, showing that a potentially 
great mind may be stunted by the environment. In England 
Theodorus in the seventh century, and Alcuin, the great scholar 
of the day, kept alive the sparks of learning. Their ideas im- 
pressed him to cause the clergy to teach the people. Disrupting 
forces were too strong and centuries of confusion followed the 
death of Charlemagne. Germany and France separated, and by 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 73 

the tenth century the separation was final by differences in lan- 
guage and feeling, but the German kings were truckling to Rome 
like the moth around the candle, till German unity was split into 
numerous fragments and lost for long, terrible centuries. In 
what is now France the German conquerers identified themselves 
with Rome and under Hughes Capet in 987 began the feudal 
system which the kings fought unavailingly. It enabled a tem- 
porary means for civil order, a transition to better times. So- 
ciety was disorderly, disorganized, fragmentary. A feudal 
system is adapted to low intelligences, incapable of combining for 
mutual benefit without being compelled to do so through some 
lord who takes advantage of their ability to prey upon others for 
his own gain, while incidentally preventing them from robbing 
and destroying each other, because he would lose their services 
and not the he cared for their welfare. Later from habit and 
convenience they refrained from cutting each other's throats and 
after many centuries they are beginning to feel the nonsense of 
not respecting the lives and rights of strangers and foreigners. 
Modern public charities are dispensed by feudal political organi- 
zations like Tammany. The feudal system in anything and any- 
where proclaims selfish indifference to the common welfare, 
though a keen desire to avoid harm to self may exist, the average 
anthropoid being unable to realize that by compelling respect 
for the rights of all his own rights will best be secured. 

Russia and other parts of Asia still live under the feudal 
methods w r hich began to be relinquished in Europe about the 
tenth century. The system originated by some one, who was 
strong enough to do so, grabbing the lands and charging the 
others for their use. The small proprietor often gave up his 
estate for protection. In Gaul these practices ran to extremes 
and the chiefs begrudged the very air their dependents breathed 
because it could not be taxed. As a rule some one feudal chief- 
tain would prove to be strong enough to lord it over the others 
within convenient distances and we see the evolution of a king. 
Circumstances here and there gathered kingdoms under an em- 
peror with the whole fabric breaking down and rearranging on 
new lines with other titles, but all amounting to the same old 
game of grab. The king owned the kingdom and gave fiefs to 



74 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

nobles who fought for him, and they parcelled out their fiefs 
to vassels and so on down to the knight's fee. The lord could 
do anything that governments do today, make war and peace, 
coin money, give charters, take life and make servants of whom 
he pleased. Feudalism is called the protest of barbarism against 
itself and is the natural next step after anarchy. Feudal castles 
afforded both protection and clanger to friends and enemies, as 
much to one as to the other often. Toward the last these castles 
came to be hated as the strongholds of wrong and oppression. 
The Greek and Roman idea of the state being the owner of the 
people led to fearful abuses in France by the feudal lords, while 
the German idea of the state being a mere creature of the people 
saved the Germans and English from the worst effects of that 
system. Feudalism modified by inherent democracy of old 
English institutions, daunting the lords and kings, never de- 
graded the English as it did the French or Germans. At this 
time England and America are the least oppressed by developed 
conditions, while Germany surrendered too much to Roman cor- 
ruption of her original ideas concerning liberty. 

The papacy became the prize of town broils and the gift of 
harlots, but Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII in 1073, 
was a man of intellect, superior to most of the popes. He or- 
ganized the church into an absolute monarchy and secured the 
present method of selecting the pope by the cardinals and estab- 
lished celibacy of priests. His reforms kicked him into exile. 

The crusades followed to rescue the tomb of Christ from the 
infidels and the Turks still have it. But the crusades got people 
into the habit of travel, got them over their ignorance of foreign 
places and people, liberalized them in spite of the clutch the 
priests still attempt on their brains. Commerce grew out of this 
and developed between Europe and other countries until it pushed 
into India and China, the chief cities of Asia were visited, and 
Mongols appeared at European courts. 

The crusades helped to do away with the feudal system, as 
man}-* nobles sold their lands to go crusading and the isolated life 
of the castle gave way to the grab for the brilliance of court life. 
The crusades also did much to give impulse to learning, to 
awaken thought and increase intellectual activity. There was 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 75 

a vast literature of the lives of saints and martyrs; the false 
decretals were a typical product of mediaeval times, exhibiting 
dense ignorance and mistakes that the sehool boy of today might 
deteet. the product of such low cunning as ward politicians exer- 
cise, especially when in control of such helpless beings as the 
insane and the public funds for their care. Scholasticism arose 
from absence of a study of facts and from deference to authority 
such as Aristotle ; the childish intellect of the middle ages was 
forbidden to develop, to think, it was fed upon superstition and 
commanded merely to obey and hand* over its earnings. In Italy, 
Manzoni says, bravos organized with impunity, untouched by 
proclamations, for churches and palaces were their asylums and 
for hundreds of years they laughed at opposition. .Knights- 
errant clad in steel wandered safely among pedestrians, burghers 
and villagers, who to repel their blows had nothing on them but 
rags. "Beautiful, useful and sapient profession!" The most 
embarrassing of all conditions in those times was that of an 
animal without claws or teeth and which nevertheless had no 
inclination to be devoured 2 . The Buonaparte family of Florence 
and later of Corsica descended from lords of Monte Boni, free- 
booters, who took toll from all on the way to Rome till the Flor- 
entines destroyed their fortress because they could not endure 
that another should do what they refrained from doing 3 . 

The ruins which travelers find so interesting along the Rhine 
and in various parts of Germany and France are those of the 
strong fortresses built by feudal lords during these troublous 
times. The necessity which caused them to be built no longer 
exists and most of them are crumbling to decay. Indeed, in the 
eighteenth century many of them were attacked and demolished 
by the descendants of the peasants who had cheerfully assisted in 
building them. When they were built they meant safety to the 
cultivators of neighboring lands. Centuries later, when social 
conditions were changed, they seemed to the peasants merely the 
emblems of oppression. 

The feudal baron outrages and tortures even in England 

- A. Manzoni. I Promessi Sposi, p. 493. 

' T. A . History of the Commonwealth of Florence, Vol. I, p. 50. 



j6 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

were bad enough as described by Green 4 . They were almost as 
bad as those of the Spanish inquisition. Knight errantry would 
produce lawlessness in one country and combine to check law- 
lessness in another country. Romances describe the better qual- 
ities of knighthood, and ascribed to the knights imaginary virtues 
and prowess ; the old trick of ancientism. Xestor makes olden 
heroes superior, and Homer gave the strength of four men to 
each of his favorites of Troy. 

William of Normandy broke down the earldoms and repudi- 
ated the claims of Rome. He protected the Jew because he was 
useful to him. The citizens held in England very different re- 
lations to the feudal nobles, and William took care to make him- 
self supreme over them. The struggle later in England was not 
like that on the continent, a struggle by kings to win back power 
from their vassals, but it was a struggle of the barons to win 
rights and privileges from the kings, and the natural allies, there- 
fore, of the nobles were the citizens. 

Bandits are in the Caucasus, and the Kurds still ravage Ar- 
menia, and not long ago bandits were in the Scottish Highlands, 
and wherever Spain rules there are ladrones. In the eighth and 
ninth centuries the piratical spirit of ancient Greece revived 
among the fierce Danes and Norwegians who led a life of con- 
stant rapine and bloodshed, interminable warfare at home and 
frightful devastation abroad. Amusement consisted in tossing 
infants to be caught on spear points, reminding us of what the 
European soldiers were accused of in the recent Chinese cam- 
paign. It became popular among some wild Scandinavians to 
become what were known as berserkers, wild fellows scantily 
clad in animal skins who at times became furious madmen, be- 
having like destructive beasts. 

Some of the unfairness with which German women were 
and are treated may be seen in a sample law coming down from 
these rough days : The Ebenbiirtige which made illegitimate the 
offspring of low caste marriages. The unebenbiirtige wife gives 
her hand to a prince trusting not to the law but to his honor 
not to throw her aside when a profitable match presents. And 

4 History of English People, Vol. I, p. 128. 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 



77 



as to the manner in which the laboring poor are treated there is 
a favorite print in village inns in Germany representing the 
Bauer and the parasites who prey upon him: The emperor 
stands on one step with the motto "I live on the taxes," a soldier 
on a platform beneath says "I pay for nothing," the pastor on his 
stage remarks "I am supported by the tithes," the beggar whines 
"I live on what is given me," the nobleman airily says "I pay no 
taxes," and the Jew mutters "I bleed them all." Beneath the 
whole crew stands the Bauer, with bent back, exclaiming : "Dear 
God help me, I have to maintain all these !" . The burdens remain 
to this day unrelieved and if there is any difference they are more 
onerous in many cases. 

Feudal dues in France included the right of hunting, of fish- 
ing, of river crossing, of escorting merchants to protect their 
goods, etc. Vassals paid to bake bread in seignorial ovens, to 
grind corn in seignorial mills, to make their wine in seignorial 
wine presses. In differences of agreement the case was decided 
by a duel or appeal to arms. The right of private war was re- 
garded as a necessity. All lords and some barons made judicial 
sentences and condemned to death. Serfs had no rights. An 
old legist said the baron might take from the serfs all they had 
and keep them in prison as long as he liked. Michelet 5 mentions 
the fighting qualities of the church dignitaries who rode chargers, 
hunted and fought, wielded swords and battle axes : "We hear 
of a bishop being deposed by the whole episcopal bench as too 
pacific and not courageous enough." Such was the state of 
things when Hughes Capet came to the throne. 

Fellowship of suffering knit together all the victims of 
tyranny. After the work of the day was over the inhabitants of 
the same neighborhood used to assemble and discuss the long tale 
of their grievances, the duties they had to pay, the corvees to 
which they were subjected, labor for which they received no 
compensation' 5 . William of Jumieges gives an interesting ac- 
count of the origin and development of a vast association 
throughout the length and breadth of the duchy, the object of 
which was the destruction of the feudal system. Unfortunately 

5 History of France, Vol. II. 
r ' Masson, Mediaeval France. 



78 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

the plot was discovered and the members were frightfully mal- 
treated. During the hundred years war there was no affliction 
that did not fall upon France, foreign soldiery chased Frenchmen 
from their homes and a cruel nobility and clergy lived upon them. 
In the days of Charles VI it is said that "the nobles were like 
bears, lions, wolves who were combined to fleece the cattle. The 
peasantry ass, cow, ox, goat came in turn to bend the knee before 
the wild beasts of the forests ; the sheep ventured timidly to say 
that he has already been four times sheared, quatre fois plumee. 
To these doleful and piteous moanings of the common people a 
concert of sharp and threatening voices answers : Sa de l'ar- 
gent !, Sa de l'argent ! ; Money !, Money !. Such is the cry which 
all day long sounds in the ear of the famished people." 

Pilgrimages to the Holy City circulated stories of the wonder- 
ful relics and the miracles that were performed there, also that 
Jews and Mohammedans abused the Christians. The earliest ap- 
peal to arms was by a Frenchman, Gerbert of Aurillac, who be- 
came pope under the name of Sylvester II, in 1002, and through 
the eloquence of a fanatic, Peter the Hermit, a native of Picardy, 
the first crusading army set out. In 1095 an immense concourse 
of people gathered at Clermont and in their midst appeared the 
wretched looking Peter, small with bare arms and feet, his dress 
a woolen tunic and a cloak of coarse cloth. He had come from 
Italy where he had persuaded the pope, Urban II, to summon the 
people to arms for the Christian faith. The answer to his dis- 
course was unanimous in the cry "Die el volt!," "God wills it!" 
Thousands fastened to their garments a cross cut out of red 
cloth, and started for the Holy Land. The army was motley and 
made up for discipline by enthusiasm and simple faith. A crazy 
nobleman from Burgundy calling himself Gautier sans avoir, 
Walter the Penniless, led with 15,000, then came Peter the Her- 
mit at the head of a hundred thousand pilgrims, and finally a 
German priest, Gotteschalck, with 15,000 more in the rear. The 
disorders committed by that rabble were so great that the inhab- 
itants of the countries through which they passed rose up against 
them and slaughtered them. The handful reaching the shores of 
Asia Minor fell under the swords of Turks in the plains of 
Nicaea, all but i.oon men and Peter the Hermit. 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 79 

Later, in the spring of 1097, six hundred thousand foot and 
a hundred thousand cavalry started and were reduced to 50,000 
bv plague, famine and sickness. They deserted in such numbers, 
also, until only 300 knights remained, and fifty years passed be- 
fore another crusade was attempted. The most absurd expedi- 
tion being that under the boys Stephen and Nicholas, in I2T2, 
when 50,000 children were sent in ships to capture the Holy 
Land under the delusion that innocence of the crusaders would 
alone secure victory. The greater part of this helpless army 
perished miserably by sea and land ; many of those who survived 
were enslaved by their captors. 

Boniface YIII, to replenish the papal coffers and pacify the 
starving Romans, instituted the Festival of Jubilee or Holy Year 
— a revival of a pagan ceremonial. A plenary indulgence was 
offered all who visited St. Peter and St. Paul churches in Rome. 
An immense concourse of pilgrims from all parts of Christendom 
had attested the wisdom of the invention, "and two priests stood 
night and day with rakes in their hands to collect without count- 
ing the heaps of gold and silver that were poured on the altar of 
St. Paul 7 ." 

The City of Rome had fallen from all greatness of its own 
when it came to be dependent on the fortunes of the popes. They 
took to Avignon the sustenance of the city, for it lived on the 
revenues of the papacy, and knew little of commerce beyond sell- 
ing indulgences, absolutions, benefices, relics and papal blessings. 
With anarchy were the contests of a number of powerful fam- 
ilies, the Colonna, the Orsini and others, always at strife with one 
another, who fought out their feuds in the streets and oppressed 
their neighbors. 

Then Cola di Rienzi, last of the Tribunes, made a short-lived 
revolution in 1347 by appealing to the people to re-establish the 
ancient republic. His head was turned by his success, and in- 
flated with conceit and vanity he became despotic and was driven 
out. In 1354 he came back as senator appointed by the pope, 
who thought to use him, but his influence was gone and he was 

'Gibbon, Vol. XII, Ch. 59. 



So THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

slain by a mob. Lytton claims that excommunication turned the 
people against him. 

The Gabelle or infamous government tax on common salt 
made more suffering than can be readily conceived in this age 
and in this comparatively free country. It was begun by Philip 
de Valois, king of France, by compelling all to buy salt from his 
storekeepers, exclusively, and this monopoly became one of the 
chief sources of revenue of the crown. The word gabelle is old 
Teuton allied to the Anglo-Saxon gafel or tax 8 . Under the old 
regime the chief method of taxing was known as the taille or 
personal tax, a loose and dishonest apportionment, by which some 
escaped taxing while others were overtaxed, and bribing, with 
other corrupt means, let the bulk of the tax fall upon the peasants ; 
the nobles, clergy, officials and some professions and trades were 
exempt, only laborers and peasants were subject to it, and the 
cost was so great that in Normandy it was more than all the rest 
of their food, the duty being three thousand per cent in some 
provinces on every article of necessity unless influential enough 
to escape the imposition. Salt was ten sous per pound, thirty 
times its present price. 

Where places were brave and strong enough to defy the cow- 
ardly and rapacious government they were let alone; Brittany, 
Guienne, Poitou and several other provinces were wholly exempt 
or paid a trifling bribe, the rumor that the gabelle was to be im- 
posed there was enough to excite an insurrection. Where people 
are too stupid or helpless to protect themselves, the world over, 
they will be robbed by the nearest scoundrels, and that is why 
politicians in charge of insane asylums sometimes steal the food 
from patients, and "respectable" merchants instruct the politicians 
how to rob if allowed to divide the plunder. 

The amount of salt a family should consume was dictated by 
the government ; it would usually cost eighteen dollars a year to 
provide salt for a family of six, and it had to be paid whether the 
salt was used or not 9 . Every human being above seven years of 
age was bound to consume seven pounds of salt yearly, which 

8 T. Wright, History of France, Vol. I, p. 364. 

'J. B. Perkins, France Under Mazarin, Vol. II, Ch. 18. 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 8 1 

must be used exclusively with food or in cooking. Severe pen- 
alties were consequent upon salting meat, butter or cheese in ad- 
vance o\ their use. A fine of $400 was enforced for buying- else- 
where than from the government agent, and smugglers of salt 
were punished by imprisonment, the galleys and death; $250 
was the fine for taking a beast to a salt marsh to allow it to drink 
sea water ; salted hams and bacon were not permitted to enter 
the country ; the salt used by the fisheries was supervised and 
guarded by such vexatious regulations as to block commerce. 
The taille was said to be even worse than the gabelle, for in the 
parishes was set in motion a system of blind, stupid, remorseless 
extortion of which one cannot read now without indignation. 
Partiality and inequalities of taxation were bad enough, but the 
chief inhabitants of the country villages were compelled to fill 
in rotation the odious office of collectors. They were made re- 
sponsible for the gross amount to be levied which they might get 
as they could out of their parishioners. Friends or persons who 
had powerful patrons, pull, in American slang, were exempted, 
while enemies or the unprotected were drained of their last farth- 
ing. The collectors, we are told, went about, always keeping 
well together for fear of violence, making their visits and assess- 
ments, meeting everywhere a chorus of imprecations. As the 
taille was always in arrears, on one side of the street might be 
seen the collectors of the present year pursuing their exactions, 
while on the other side of the street were those previously en- 
gaged on the same business trying to collect balances due for past 
years, and farther on were the agents of the gabelle employed in 
a similar manner. From morning to evening, from year's begin- 
ning to its ending, they tramped, escorted by volleys of oaths 
and curses, getting a penny here and a penny there, for prompt 
payment under this marvelous system was not to be thought of 10 . 
Spies were multiplied and illicit trade sprang up through smug- 
gling salt from the districts where the price was less to where it 
was greater, and when the religious and military taxes had taken 
all the farmers owned they became smugglers. For the first 

10 J. C. Morison. The Reign of Louis XIV., Fortnightly Review, April, 
-• Vol. XXT. 



82 THE EVOLUTION OK MAN AND HIS MIND. 

offense against the salt laws there were heavy fines, the galleys 
tor the second violation, and hanging for the third. There were 
3,500 imprisoned and 500 executed each year for "false trade" 
of this kind. An army of soldiers watched the peasants and 
made it the means of persecution ; inspecting pots and pans and 
comparing what salt was found with the written permission to 
use it. Whether they had much or little salt it could be construed 
as evidence of dealing with smugglers, and arrests followed. 
Finally the government forced the peasants to use a certain quan- 
tity of salt, whether they wanted to do so or not, or they would 
be accused of "false trade." 11 

The fall of France and Feudalism at Crecy, in 1347, was 
through the unexpected superiority of the unmounted common 
people to the mounted knighthood 12 . The foolish peasants at 
last realized their strength and feudalism tottered thenceforth 
to its fall, and in 1360 parliament began to legislate for the people 
instead of against them. In commercial unions tradesmen and 
merchants began to form associations not only in cities but be- 
tween them. The league of the Rhine embraced sixty cities in 
the thirteenth century and later the Swabian and Hanseatic 
leagues were still more extensive. The monarchs recognized in 
the cities their best allies against feudalism and availed them- 
selves of this chance to grab away the power the feudal lords 
grabbed from the people without sufficiently recognizing their 
sovereign's right to share in the grabs, so while the kings did 
not like the presumption of the cities in asserting their freedom, 
these divinely anointed grabbers gladly used the cities to fight 
for a regular system of taxation rather than the irregular one of 
feudal misgovernment. New nations began to arise in Europe, 
the days of anarchy and isolation were coming to an end, and, 
created by the crusades, the revival of learning, the spread of 
commerce and other forces, general sentiments spread enough 
to centralize and unite people in a common organization. The 
fourth crusade founded the Latin empire of the east on the ruins 
of the Greek empire. The people and many of the clergy began 

11 Petite histoire du people francais, Paul Lacombe. 

12 Green's History of English People, p. 285. 



THE MIDDLE AGES. S3 

to oppose the pretensions of the papal power; rival popes at Rome 
and Avignon finally cursed each other, and in 1414 the council 
of Constance was to determine between the claims of three popes. 
A century later the scattered forces of reform gathered. The 
invention of the printing press helped Luther to succeed where 
all others had failed and he sowed Europe with his fiery pam- 
phlets. 

Soon thereafter the Elizabethan age with its Shakespeare and 
other intellects, through the recent art of printing, enjoyed fruit- 
ful fields of labor by which better ideas were spread. 

"For many years past the great danger to the balance of 
power appeared to come from the regular clergy who, favored 
by the success of the mendicant orders, were adding house to 
house and field to field. Never dying out, like families, and rare- 
ly losing by forfeitures, the monasteries might well nigh calculate 
the time when all the soil of England should be their own." 13 

The clergy schemed to get more land, but parliament with 
the people stayed their hand in 1279. 

The Swiss Confederacy arose through a league of three can- 
tons in 1 29 1, being called upon to stand together in resistance to 
Austria. In 13 15 Leopold, Duke of Austria, invaded the Switz- 
erland forest cantons and was defeated, whereupon neighboring 
cantons and cities joined the league. The Confederacy has ex- 
isted to this day, showing what intelligent unison will accom- 
plish against tyranny. 

In England the alliance was nobles and. people against the 
king, instead of king and nobles against the people, as on the 
continent. This is illustrated in 121 5 by Magna Charta being 
wrenched from King John, the first document of the English 
constitution in which privileges and rights are won for noble 
and commoner alike. And the first parliament in which citizens 
sat as representatives w r as in December, 1264, called by a chief 
of the insurgent nobles. The grab game took a new shape in 
England with different partners and results from those of Eu- 
rope generally. 

Magna Charta analyzed shows that previously under John 

53 C. H. Pearson, History of England During Earlv and Middle Age-. Vol. 
II. Ch. o. 



84 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

the church rights were insecure, the barons were oppressed and 
in turn they oppressed the people, liberty was guaranteed no- 
where, foreign merchants were molested, people were imprisoned 
without fair trial and justice was often delayed, sold or denied. 

Martin Luther fought the rascalities of his former church 
from outside of it, after he had founded his own religion, but a 
greater reformer, Savonarola, thundered effectively against the 
rottenness introduced into Catholicism by priestly knaves while 
he remained still an officiating sermonizer in the church till as- 
sassinated by those with whose vested interests he interfered. 
Erasmus, about 15 17, published his Adages, in which he reflects 
with bitterness upon kings and priests. "It is the aim of the 
guardians of a prince," he exclaims, "that he never may become a 
man. The nobility who fatten on public calamity, endeavor to 
plunge him into pleasures that he may never learn his duty. 
Towns are burned, lands are wasted, temples are plundered, in- 
nocent citizens are slaughtered, while the prince is playing at 
dice, dancing or amusing himself with puppets, hunting or drink- 
ing." 14 Popular opinion was educated by Luther in 15 17 until 
in 1 5 18 it fully supported his views that the pope did wrong in 
granting permission to commit crime by accepting pay for the 
indulgence, and that the pope had no power over souls in purga- 
tory. The most striking effect of the first preaching of the refor- 
mation was that it appealed to the ignorant, and though political 
liberty in the sense we use the word cannot be reckoned the aim 
of those who introduced it, yet there predominated the revolu- 
tionary spirit which loves to witness destruction for its own sake, 
and that intoxicated self-confidence which renders full mischief. 15 

In the regency period of France wild schemes to better 
finances were plentiful. Louis XIV. had degraded everything. 
His profuseness and corruption were copied by every function- 
ary from high to low. The national debt was overwhelming. 
The coins were debased to four-fifths of their metal weight. The 
Bastille could not contain the tax evaders. Then John Law arose 
with his Mississippi plan and robbed France as the Panama canal 
construction did later. 

14 Hallam, Literature of Europe in the Middle Ages, Ch. IV, Sec. 41. 

15 Hallam, Op. Cit, Ch. VI, Sec. 12. 



THE MIDDLE A(ii:s. S5 

Similar financial excitements attended by great losses wefe 
what was known as the South Sea Bubble. The Tulip mania was 
about as visionary as the notion of the alchemists that common 
metals could be turned into gold or that the elixir of life could 
be fabricated chemically. Ponce de Leon roamed through the 
swamps of Florida looking for a fountain of youth and Coronado 
marched through western North America in search of the seven 
fabulous cities of Cibola, which were reputed as built of solid 
gold. 

Characteristic of the methods of the latter part of the middle 
ages was the behavior of Richard III. in imprisoning and mur- 
dering his nephews, Edward and Richard, to enable him to suc- 
ceed to his brother, Edward V., in 1483. In 15 17 Dietzel or Tet- 
zel, a prior of the Dominicans and papal representative, sold in- 
dulgences, furnishing official letters with seals "by which even 
the sins that you may have a wish to commit hereafter shall be 
all forgiven you." Repentence was not necessary, but the money 
was to be brought quickly. "The very instant the money rattles 
at the bottom of the strong box dead souls of your friends are 
released from purgatory and fly to heaven." Tetzel in Germany 
and Samson in Switzerland had a special scale of prices adjusted 
to the rank of the sinner and kind of sin he wished to commit. 16 

Francis of YValdeck wanted to make Lutheranism a private 
affair for the profit of his own family. The Anabaptists of 
Minister stood a seige of sixteen months, beginning in 1534, 
"headed by a crazy tailor, John Bockolson, "John of Leyden," with 
John Matthesen and Knipperdolling. Foolishness ran riot, vis- 
ions and revelations became common, such as enabled John of 
Leyden to have sixteen wives. 

Later still, in 1562 to 1596, religious wars were fomented in 
France by the meddling of Philip II. of Spain. The reactionary 
wars of religion in Germany followed half a century later. 

This Philip condemned millions of men, women and children 
in the Netherlands to be burned alive, buried alive and otherwise 
disposed of to suit his ideas of what would please God and Spain. 
Some of Wiclif's English ideas were carried into Bohemia and 

16 J. N. Merle D'Aubigne, The Story of the Reformation, Part I, Ch. 6. 



86 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

in the early part of the fifteenth century John Hus, a monk, began 
his reform movement. He reproved the people for their sins un- 
disturbed, but when he accused the clergy and monks of covet- 
ousness, ambition, sloth and* other vices, they turned on him. 
Hus finally denounced indulgences and thus wounded Rome in 
her pocket and he was excommunicated and imprisoned. The 
Hussites asked that the Bible be freely preached, that the sacra- 
ment be given in both forms, that the clergy be deprived of prop- 
erty and temporal power, that all sins were to be punished by the 
proper authorities. Wholesale murders, battles and a seven weeks'" 
convention that came to nothing followed, with Bohemia and 
Germany being drowned in blood for thirty years. 

The institution of ""Chivalry" should be mentioned as amount- 
ing to instruction from childhood in hysterical exploits, about 
such as Cervantes describes in Don Quijote de la Mancha. It 
however, served to mitigate much brutality of the period. 

A study of Joan of Arc should afford ideas of the conditions 
and people among whom she figured. 

She was born in 141 2 a simple country girl whose relatives,, 
neighbors and surroundings were full of fairy stories of the ex- 
ploits of saints and knights, and she evidently had inherited an 
unstable nervous system, which at times enabled her to see things 
others could not see, in insane asylum parlance : hallucinations. 
She also heard voices others could not hear, and these are not 
only similarly classified, but are regarded as a symptom of in- 
sanity liable to cause all sorts of uncomfortable, usually aggress- 
ive, acts. Ordinarily, poor Jeanne d'Arc would have passed for 
a commonplace, good little girl, somewhat queer, but the times 
gave direction and opportunity to her vagaries as they did to 
Walter the Witless, Peter the Dotty, Simon the Jumping Jack,, 
and numbers of other funny folks, who today would be on pool 
farms, kicked about by saloon-keeping ward politicians, with no 
reverence for anything but boodle. 

At thirteen she saw a brilliant light in the direction of the 
church and a voice said to her : "Jeanne be a good and kind- 
child ; go often to church." That is just such an hallucination as 
could be compounded from the advice a child of the time would 
constantly hear from priests, parents and friends, but when she 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 87 

hca ivl incessant talk about the war, the claims of Charles VII., 
and very little else, she fancied that St. Michael, St. Margaret and 
St. Catherine conversed familiarly with her, pretty much as our 
little ones nowadays tell us of the talks they have with Santa 
Clans and the things he promised to bring them. There were mil- 
lions of angels in Jeanne's dream, as the baby sees reindeer and 
toys in his vision. And for the same reason, because people were 
always talking of such things in the presence of children ; in the 
middle ages the chat was of saints, martyrs and dragons and sim- 
ilarly wonderful matters, with lots of good people swearing to 
having seen witches riding broomsticks through the air. Finally 
St. Michael told her to go to the assistance of the king of France 
and restore him to his kingdom. She had a lucid moment in 
which she answered : "My lord, I am only a poor girl and I could 
neither ride nor take the command of men-at-arms." The voice 
continued : "You must go to Maistre Robert de Baudricourt, 
captain of Yaucouleurs, and he will have you taken to the king; 
St. Margaret and St. Catherine will come to your assistance." 
Here again the. real and unreal people, captains and saints, of 
whom she incessantly heard, played their parts in her day dreams ; 
it is not necessary to think she was lying, youngsters will nar- 
rate with every appearance of truth the most preposterous cock- 
and-bull stories, and it is hard to tell whether they dreamed or in- 
vented the whole matter. 

Her father declared that she was out of her senses, but an 
uncle took her to Baudricourt and the clergy made fun of her, as 
they had a monopoly of the miracle business and wanted no fresh 
humbug to cut into their profits. Such stories as her recogniz- 
ing the king in spite of his disguise is just such trivial stuff as 
would be tacked on to "history" by miracle loving people, with 
lots of equally reliable comedy capering. 

The state of France, at the time of the hundred years' war 
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was one of measure- 
less misery. It was full of free-booters who were discharged 
soldiers, desperate, homeless and idle men, and the ruffians who 
always bestir themselves when authority disappears. They 
roamed the country in bands, large and small, stripped it of what 
war had spared and left famine behind them. 



88 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Charles VI. was an epileptic boy of 12 years with three greedy 
uncles to quarrel over him and plunder the territory in his name. 
One uncle was the Duke of Burgundy. 

The fact is that France had been overrun by enemies during 
her hundred years' war, until it was said that Englishmen had 
not seen a Frenchman's face for years, as Frenchmen showed 
only their backs. Certainly there was great discouragement, and 
evidently with little reason, for at Orleans the English served 
their guns badly, but the French were equally inefficient until 
Jeanne appeared to cheer them up with expectation of miraculous 
intervention, firing them with bigoted devotion as the stories of 
what wonderful things she could do were camp-fire talk until 
they got up an artificial courage and actually fought instead of 
ran. 

Her grateful king and country sold her to the English for 
10,000 livres and a judge was appointed to try her for witchcraft, 
being in league with the devil, etc. The duke of Burgundy prom- 
ised this judge, Pierre Cauchon, to make him a bishop if he con- 
demned Jeanne, and the reverend politician resorted to all the 
tricks you can see in an occasional modern judge who has been 
bought up to terrify, thwart, belittle and defeat a helpless sup- 
pliant, dependent upon his mercy. 

In May, 143 1, she w T as burned alive as a sorceress, after a 
mock trial in which evidence was suppressed and there were per- 
jured witnesses and ignoring of her right of appeal to the pope; 
she was so ignorant that she did not know she had such a right 
and no one told her, not even St. Michael. When she was safely 
dead it struck the tardy intellects of the anthropoids that as the 
church repudiated her through the trial and condemnation her 
success in placing Charles securely in his job of living on the 
labor of hard-working clod-hoppers must have been through the 
aid of her friend, the devil, so twenty-four years after her being 
burned, Charles asked Pope Calixtus to have the trial revised, 
and on July 7, 1456, the rehabilitation of the Maid of Orleans 
was proclaimed and for four hundred years the people of France 
thought her good enough to make a saint of and many intimations 
came from Rome that she was about to be promoted in heaven, 
but the desire was juggled with, as Rome wanted to see what 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 89 

there was in it for her, as politicians remark, and the French 
government awoke to the observation that priestly and church 
sisterhood schools, while well enough meant as a rule, taught 
the children to be good little dolts and monkeys and not to dare 
to think except as the church dictated even where their country 
was concerned, whereupon the government ended that sort of 
schooling and Rome retaliates like a child, refused a bite of apple, 
practically saying, well, you can go to blazes with your old Joan 
of Arc, she was a fraud after all. At least that meaning can be 
given to the following news from Paris, August 2, 1902 : 

France is much disturbed by the news from Rome that the 
Sacred College of Cardinals definitely refuses to canonize Joan 
of Arc. 

The decision, coming after several favorable opinions had 
been issued and committees had been appointed to examine into 
the heroine's claims to beatification, is construed as a retaliation 
for the expulsion of the religious orders from France. 

The Sacred College mentions five reasons to justify refusal: 

First, that Joan of Arc culpably attacked Paris on a religious 
fete day, while the city was celebrating the birth of the mother of 
Jesus. 

Second, her capture disproved her claim of having a heaven- 
ordered mission. 

Third, her attempted evasion shows that martyrdom was suf- 
fered unwillingly. 

Fourth, that she lacked heroism when she signed an abjura- 
tion of alleged errors. 

Fifth, according to her own admissions, it is doubtful whether 
she died a virgin. 

The French people are deeply grieved at the decision, and the 
last reason makes even non-believers indignant, as they regard 
it as a wicked insinuation. 



CHAPTER V. 
EVOLUTION. 

The evolutionary doctrine not only refers to the life-history 
of mankind, animals and plants, but the processes by which the 
universe was constructed and is passing on to its dissolution. 

Man is part and parcel of the universe, and as he proceeded 
from and was created by the workings of the laws of the universe 
and is made from the same elements you find in rocks, metals, 
trees, seas, clouds, suns, and stars, and as man exists because the 
universe exists, to study him aright we must survey him as he 
aggregates in families, tribes and nations, in his relations with, 
resemblances to, and differences from the animals with which he 
is associated. 

The more exact our knowledge becomes, the deeper we study 
into the nature of all things, the more consistent we will find the 
explanations afforded by evolutionism and we are lifted above the 
childish views of things the less informed entertain, and are freed 
from their superstitions and liability to misdirection of energies. 

The popular notion of the doctrine of descent is that evolu- 
tionists claim that man came from an ancestral monkey, which 
is about as inaccurate as are most current opinions upon scientific 
subjects. One of the stock refutations of the unscientific is to 
call attention to certain educational lights, having refused to ac- 
cept the Darwinian philosophy. We may find honest as well as 
dishonest differences of opinion arising everywhere ; in law, med- 
icine, theology, politics and in our very homes, over what appears 
to you to be the most undebatable subject. Every new idea has 
been fought at the outset. Lactantius and Eusebius denied that 
the earth was round, while Basil and Ambrose talked of the possi- 
bility of anyone escaping eternal torments who believed that sort 
of nonsense. Cosmos' assertion of the flatness of the world was 
not denied for six hundred years, and then d'Ascoli paid with his 

90 



EVOLUTION. 



9« 



life for proclaiming his doubt. The Newtonian and Copernican 
theories were ridiculed by Luther and Melancthon. The life of 
Descartes was sought by his confreres for stating truths that are 
taught in our schools today. 

The bright side of evolutionism appears in recognizing that 
man can go on improving indefinitely and rise immeasurably 
above his present condition. Lives of devotion to principle will 
come to be considered worthy of emulation rather than the wolfish 
scramble for money from juvenility to the grave. The penniless 
missionary who threw his life away in trying to elevate some 
wretched race will be appreciated as superior to the sleek lux- 
uriating fashionable dealer in platitudes who gives his hearers 
"what they think they want'' to enable him to hold his place. 
Many parts of the world grow better, because they evolve. The 
evolutionary theory, therefore, gives us more hope for the future 
than is derivable from any other source. 

After all what does acceptance of a theory by the public 
amount to as evidence of its- validity ? The majority today does 
not deny that the earth is round, but gives you no reason for it 
other than that it is generally accepted as true. They laugh at 
the negro preacher Jasper for claiming that "the sun do move," 
yet he is more logical, even though equally ignorant, for he cites 
his authority. It is growing customary to accept the evolutionary 
theory, not because it is any better understood by people at large, 
but because opposition to it is antiquated. "Beliefs" are put away 
like hoop skirts, ear-rings and frilled shirts. 

In 1885 a man in London wagered several thousand pounds 
that the world was flat and appealed to the law against the de- 
cision of his referees ; the next year another in Washington of- 
fered $10,000 for proofs that would convince him that the earth 
was a sphere. It would probably be as easy to convince the 
average politician that honesty is the best policy. 

Referring again to the opposition to new and valuable ideas, 
the discoverer of oxygen, Priestley, was refused an appointment 
in a scientific expedition owing to his advanced views in 1772. 
Alexander von Humboldt's researches were snubbed and opposed 
by many who should have known better. Roger Bacon, whose 
chemical knowledge was three hundred years ahead of his time, 



9 2 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 



was persecuted by the pundits of Oxford. When anatomy was 
made a science by Vesalius he was hounded to death by the dis- 
ciples of the old medical school of Galen. Preventive measures 
against pestilence, such as were afforded by vaccination, quaran- 
tine, etc., met with violent hindrances. Chloroform as an anaes- 
thetic was at first condemned by clergymen and physicians as an 
impious interference with God's intention that men should suffer. 
Buffon's simple geological truths were derided and Cuvier 
truckled to his imperial master in doing all he could against the 
genius Lamarck, whose studies of animal development made a 
revolution in zoology. 

Men naturally regard themselves as the most important things 
on earth and imagine that the universe was made for them alone, 
that plants and animals, suns, moons, and stars, seas and lands 
were made for their convenience, whereas man is a comparatively 
insignificant animal with feeble muscular power ; many of his 
senses are poorly developed, when w T e consider the sight of the 
eagle and smelling sense of the hound. The intelligence of man, 
in the long run, enables him to triumph over hostile influences in 
nature which in individual cases are terribly destructive. That is, 
man survives through advantages he enjoys, in spite of multitudes 
who are overcome in the battle of life. 

The Mediterranean sea was popularly regarded as the center 
of the Earth's surface, but doubts on this point accumulated as 
more lands were discovered. Of course the earth itself was sup- 
posed to be the most important part of creation and it was thought 
that suns, moons, and stars were small in comparison, and merely 
revolved about us to give us light. It was a great shock to learn 
that the earth moved round the sun, which was much larger than 
the world we live in. Such new ideas were regarded as liable to 
upset the powers of a set of rulers who claimed divine knowledge 
on these points, so it was considered best to try to kill off the new 
notion even if necessary to destroy those who advance such ideas. 
We complacently reconciled ourselves to the new place assigned 
us by science, but w r ere jostled again w r hen our sun was found to 
be a mere speck in the universe of stars, many of which were 
larger than our whole system of sun, moon, and planets put to- 
gether. 



EVOLUTION. 93 

Picture our earth blazing - as a star for millions of years; the 
iron and minerals existing- in a state of gas, and, finally, as heat 
enough had been given off, patches of liquid and solid substances 
began to accumulate until a crust was formed, which was inces- 
santly being torn by enormous volleys of melted masses thrown 
up from below. Watery vapor condensed into hot seas, after 
awhile, to be often tossed aloft as steam again. Hot rains fell 
upon the shrinking, wrinkling, folding heaving surface, as solid- 
ification went on. Dislocation threw up mountains and the crust 
thickened till at the present day it is about fifty miles deep. This 
on the scale of a ball eight inches in diameter would afford one- 
twentieth of an inch of solid crust, or about the thickness of wrap- 
ping paper, while all the rest may be fire and melted materials. 

As to when the evolutionary idea began we would have to go 
back to Aristotle, who hinted at a relationship between the lowest 
plant and the highest animal on account of certain matters in 
common between them ; then Bonnet and Lamarck thought ani- 
mals were developed from lower into higher forms and von Baer 
pointed out the remarkable similarity of the unborn young of 
higher to those of the lower animals, such as fishes and lizards, 
and asks : "Why should a dog begin like a fish, a lizard, and a 

bird?" 

Robt. Chambers 1 advanced the hypothesis applicable to all 
similar theaters of vital being that the simplest and most primitive 
type under a law to which that of like production is subordinate, 
gave birth to the type next above it, that this again produced the 
next higher, and so on to the very highest, the stages of advance 
being in all cases very small, namely from one species to another. 

Geologists found that the lower down they dig into the earth 
the simpler become the animal forms, so that in the oldest rocks 
we find no monkeys or four-footed animals, no lizards or frogs, 
but only shells of sea animals and a few bones of fishes of kinds 
different from those now living. Evolution is proceeding daily, 
hourly, all about us. The child evolves into the grown person, 
the kitten into a cat, the puppy into doghood, the calf into the ox 
or cow, the lamb into the sheep, the seed into the tree, villages into 
towns and towns into cities, families into tribes, and tribes into 

'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844. 



94 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

nations, savage people into civilized people and so on. 

The change of gases to liquids and solids are every-day events, 
the formation of crystals are also familiar to us, but, while plants 
and animals are made up of the very same things of which we are 
speaking : carbon that forms coal and diamonds, nitrogen and 
ogygen, that we breathe in the air, and hydrogen, which, with the 
oxygen, constitutes water, there is evidently something that binds 
these substances into living organisms. The processes of life are 
largely mechanical, the food is split up into combinations suitable 
for deposit from the blood as bone, muscle, tendon, hair, teeth, 
etc., and none realizes the mechanical nature of these processes 
so clearly as the one skilled in the use of the high power micro- 
scope. He will take the flesh, bones, etc., and magnify them to 
an extent equal to making man a mile in height and proportion- 
ately broad. He demonstrates that not only a man, but all other 
animals, and also plants without exception, are composed of in- 
numerable little specks called cells, which are compressed me- 
chanically into a variety of shapes. These cells differ slightly 
from each other in composition, according to location, but in the 
main, they consist of the same carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and 
nitrogen; occasionally iron, phosphorus cr lime is added. Each 
cell eats, grows, splits into two or more cells, and is finally con- 
sumed or thrown off to be replaced by its successors, and every 
one of these multitudinous cells, varying in size from a hundred 
thousandth of an inch to one-tenth of an inch, has proceeded from 
a single cell which grew and divided up into the colony that forms 
the individual. And that original cell, which by its multiplica- 
tion formed the man, is an egg. The original cell which by its 
multiplication formed the tree or other plant is the seed. The 
main chemical difference between the seed and the egg being the 
frequent absence of nitrogen from the first named. Eggs and 
seeds vary in size from invisibility to the unaided eye, up to a foot 
in diameter. A hen's egg seems to you a very lifeless thing, but it 
depends upon what you call life as to whether it is to be so regard- 
ed or not. When the protoplasm of that egg is capable of being 
warmed into cell division, to the chick's formation, you will grant", 
probably, that it lives, although it does not show life through visi- 
ble motions of its particles. When the chemical constituents of 



EVOLUTION. 



95 



that egg break down into simpler combinations and each of them 
is capable of assimilating carbon, hydrogen, etc., and building 
them up into higher and complex molecules similar to the cell 
protoplasm, there is life. When the process is inverted and ret- 
rograde, when the solids break down into liquids and both evolve 
gases, often simple elements, then the cell or individual is dead. 

Naturally physiologists are deeply interested in the cellular 
phenomena and the problem of life is being chased with micro- 
scopes and reagents until it is becoming better understood at 
least. Hoppe- Sevier, at the inauguration of a great German 
physiological laboratory, spoke of life as that chemical power that 
enabled protoplasmic molecules to exist in an anhydrous condition 
in a hydrated medium. In as plain language as possible the ele- 
mentary atoms that are grouped into particles exist dry amidst 
water. That does not exactly express it, but it is as near as tech- 
nical language can be translated in this instance. 

A low living representative of the cell abounds in our gut- 
ters, crawls over our roofs, and is in ditches, all about us. It is 
known as the amoeba. It is, so to speak, a living, moving, egg, that 
never passes beyond the egg stage. It is like a little speck of al- 
bumen, or white of egg, and has no organs whatever ; no eyes, 
feet, ears, nerves, muscles or bones ; it is merely a particle of jelly, 
yet it moves by spreading out, pouring itself along in a streak, 
and when anything it can assimilate is touched, such as vegetable 
or animal matter, gradually it converts such edibles to its own 
use, then it grows and splits into two amoebae, which part com- 
pany and they in turn eat, grow and divide. Now the difference 
between this cell form, the unicellular and other cell forms, the 
multicellular, is simply and mainly in the cells, into which it di- 
vides, not sticking together. The amoeba is the egg form and 
never can be anything but an egg, and it remains as it is. But 
somewhere, somehow, one more amoeba, out of the countless 
billions which went on and still go on parting company, did co- 
here, probably by a little accidental hardening of the outer mem- 
brane enveloping it. The splitting or fission process went on, but 
the cells clung together and we have the mulberry form of low 
living animals, such as the Norwegian "flilnmerball. , ' It is no- 
ticed that when finally the mulberry or "synamoeba" form does 



96 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

split it gives birth to amoebae, which afterward become mulberry 
forms again, like the parent. Now comes a change, one or a few 
of those mulberry forms, apparently by accident, took a step 
higher and originated the pouched or "gastaeada'' form. If you 
can imagine the cells of the mulberry form gathered at the sur- 
face of its globe, with water in the middle, suddenly collapsing, 
you will have the pouch constructed with two layers, like an old 
Dutch worsted night cap, capable of being turned either way. A 
bag with two thicknesses of material. Here we get the first 
glimpse of differentiation, or division of labor between cells. 
Those upon the inside of the pouch do the food gathering and 
pass it through themselves to the other cells and the outer cells 
attend to navigation. Changes of environment have produced 
a vast multitude of animals with this shape upon which accessory 
organs have grown by development. The sea anemone and the 
earth worm are close to this stage. The worm is merely an 
elongated pouch animal. The double layers of cells are demon- 
strable in it. When a pouclj animal, as the worm, develops an 
egg internally, that Qgg resembles the single cell amoeba, next the 
mulberry form, and lastly the pouch or worm form. 

The back-boned animals come next, but we cannot dwell upon 
the rapid and many changes that take place in the evolution of 
one higher form into a still higher. The acrania or headless stage 
follows with a cartilagious rod instead of a backbone. This head- 
less form exists as a headless animal called the amphioxus, a 
Mediterranean fishlike form. It has rudimentary blood vessels 
and its young pass through all the previous stages to the acranial. 
That is, first a single cell, then mulberry and pouch forms. 

The tenth stage of Hseckel is that of single nostriled animals 
like the lamprey eels, and both embryology and comparative anat- 
omy show that these eels pass by easy gradations into the selachii, 
or what are now represented by the living sharks, only less highly 
organized. Sharks pass through all the previous stages to the eel 
or single nostril stage in their development. 

The living Salamander fish represents the twelfth or mud 
fish stage. Gilled amphibians come next. Tadpoles reach their 
development through all the stages mentioned till they resemble 
the mud fish, when the gills drop off and the frog appears. Some 



EVOLUTION. 



97 



of these amphibia with gills retained their tails and this form 
dates hack to the coal period geologically. From these tailed ba- 
trachia came lizards and reptiles generally. Geology and the de- 
velopment of these animals prove this. One of the best proven 
successions we have is the transformation of reptiles into birds. 
( )f course reptiles remain as reptiles today, but at a very early 
period of the world's history several, mayhap many, reptiles slow- 
ly developed into birds. Scales, such as fishes and reptiles have, 
many be shown to divide into hairs, and hairs into feathers. The 
downy, hairy breast of the little chicken, and its wing feathers, 
may be seen to become broader and split at the ends, resplitting 
until each hair becomes a feather. The fossil remains of animals 
half reptilian, half bird-like, have been found, and all birds pass 
through the previous stages from the single cell to the reptilian 
form, and even develop and lose their gills in the process of de- 
velopment. Thus, step by step, marsupials like the kangaroo 
sprang from a form called promammalian, like the queer platy- 
pus, which has the body of a dog, the tail of a beaver, spurs of a 
rooster, and the bill and feet of a duck. 

Half-apes, or prosimiae, probably originated about the begin- 
ning of the Tertiary period out of the marsupial or rat-like form, 
and through a higher brain development. The lemurs are large 
living specimens of this class and the resemblances to the lower 
and next higher forms are seen combined in them. The flat- 
nosed, tailed-apes, branched out to one side, while the sharp-nosed 
stand in our line. The jaw of the lemur was modified in the tailed 
ape, with narrow noses, the catarrhine, and the claws became 
converted into nails. The manlike apes or anthropoids follow, 
namely, orang outang and gibbon in Asia, the gorilla and chim- 
panzee in Africa. These apes lost their tails, partially lost their 
hairy coverings, and developed brains. It was from a prehis- 
toric anthropoid form, such as this, that the ape-like man, the 
speechless primeval man, arose. The forehand of the ape form 
developed into a human hand and the hinder hand into a foot, 
the fingers degenerated into toes. 

All the preceding stages mentioned are passed through by 
every living man in his development, preceding and after his 
birth, the single cell to the lemur, and at birth the ape-like stage. 



98 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Observe the prehensile power of the infant's foot. It has the mon- 
key-like ability of grasping with its feet and finger-like toes. 

The gradual development of the animal language of sounds 
into words going hand' in hand with the better developed larynx, 
lungs, etc., and the brain, to regulate the vocal parts, brings man 
up to his present advance upon the brutes ; some men rather, for 
some Fuegians have but a miserable vocabulary, and they cannot 
count over three. They fairly represent a class of primitive men. 

In September, 1901, Professor Hseckel studied a human-like 
monkey of Java. An interesting specimen of the young gibbon 
was watched by him at his own house there. The species is 
found only in Java, and is called Hylobates leuciscus. The na- 
tives call it, on account of the characteristic sound it utters, 
"oa." When standing it is scarcely taller than a child of six years. 
The head is comparatively small and it has a small, slender waist. 
The legs are short and the arms much longer. The face is more 
human than that of the orang outang. Professor Haeckel says : 
''Its physiognomy reminded me of the manager of an insolvent 
bank pondering with wrinkled brow over the results of a crash. 
Distrust of the ''oa" towards all white Europeans is noticeable. 
On the other hand, he was on terms of intimate friendship with 
the Malays in our household, especially with the small children. 
He never crawled on all fours when tired of running, but 
stretched on the grass beneath the tropical sun with one arm 
under his head. "When I held tasty food just out of his reach 
he cried like a naughty child, 'huite, huite,' a sound altogether 
different from 'oa, oa,' with which he expressed various emo- 
tions. He had a third and more shrill sound when he was sud- 
denly frightened. The speech of these human monkeys has not 
many different sounds, but they are modulated and altered in tone 
and strength with a number of repetitions. They also use many 
gestures, motions with their hands, and grimaces, which are so 
expressive in manner that a careful observer can detect their dif- 
ferent wishes and various emotions. My specimen liked sweet 
wine ; he drank like a child, and peeled bananas and oranges, just 
as we are accustomed to do, holding the fruit in his left hand. 
Most of the Malays do not regard the gibbon and orang outang 
as brutes. Thev believe that the former are bewitched men, and 



EVOLUTION. 99 

the latter to be criminals who have been changed to monkeys as 
punishment. Others think they are men in the course of de- 
velopment." 

Evidences are abundant to prove that many fishlike mammals, 
as whales, descended from forms more like land animals resem- 
bling the bear. In some whales the very young have teeth and 
rudimentary leg bones, which in the adult are lost. It is conceiv- 
able that millions of years ago some bears betook themselves to 
the sea for fish, and in time their progeny developed abilities to 
survive in a watery medium, better than upon land. It can be 
easily demonstarted that the fins of the fish pass gradually into 
the limbs of quadrupeds, and we are justified in believing that this 
change came about by some fishes taking to land for food. 

Consistently with the Darwinian discovery we find rudimen- 
tary organs in many animals, including man, which enables us 
to trace the origin of such beings better. The ostrich and casso- 
wary have rudimentary wings because their ancestors gradually 
came to depend more upon their legs than upon flying. The com- 
mon house fly has rudimentary hind wings, but it descended 
with all other insects from a single form with four wings and 
three pairs of legs. In thin animals, as serpents and serpent- 
like lizards, one lung is rudimentary. Birds similarly have the 
right ovary atrophied. Man has rudimentary muscles attached 
to ears which are useful in lower animals, but are functionless 
in him. The coccyx end of the spine is the same in the four 
higher apes as in man. These five primates, man and the an- 
thropoids, have only rudimentary tails. Xot only does the un- 
born human baby have a visible tail, but at one stage it possesses 
gills. Horses have w 7 hat are known as splint bones, which in 
their progenitors were extra leg-bones or finger bones, with 
hoofs at the end. The warty growth on the inside of the horses' 
legs are rudimentary hoofs. Man has a little fleshy growth in 
the inner corner of his eye ; this is called the caruncle, and is a 
rudiment of the nictitating membrane or third eyelid of lower 
animals which may become pathological. A long muscle which 
in four-footed animals serves a useful purpose in the hind leg 
is only occasionally found in human corpses, and when found 
is often not attached to the leg. The vermiform appendix at- 



L.cfC. 



IOO THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

tached to intestines has no use in man, except to aid in killing" 
him at times, but is an important entrail in birds. 

Prof. E. D. Cope found fossil remains of the ancestor of alt 
horses, and, strangely enough, it was a carnivore or flesh eater. 
It had five toes and was digitigrade, that is it walked upon the 
tips of its fingers like a cat. As time passed and swiftness be- 
came a life-saving ability, and it was driven to the plains, its 
descendants became grass eaters, through compulsion, and the 
finger and toe bones lengthened until the heel cord of the mod- 
ern horse is half way to its body, while the other fingers, one 
by one, fell off as they became useless. The horse evolution is 
thoroughly demonstrated. We have the bony remains of the 
five-toed, four-toed, three-toed, two-toed horses in direct lines 
from each other, the greater number of toes lying in the deeper 
strata of the earth. 

The proofs of evolutionary doctrine may be summed up by 
condensing from Hseckel as follows: I. The fossil evidences of 
the gradual appearance and historical succession of plants and 
animals, and evidence of progressive changes in their forms. 2. The 
history of organ development in plants and animals, the older ani- 
mals having ruder, the later more perfect organs. 3. The connec- 
tion between the history of descent of animals and that of the 
individual. Each man and animal repeats in his life-time the 
stages through which all his ancestors have passed. For in- 
stance, the child is a thoughtless, cruel savage, the youth a bar- 
barian and the adult may be a reasonable person. 4. The re- 
semblances between all animals point to a common origin. 5. 
The rudimentary organs. 6. The resemblances of species of 
plants and animals in family groups. 7. The geographical dis- 
tribution of species from centres or single localities. 8. The ad- 
justment of species to their environment, the weak dying off and 
fittest surviving. 9. The unity and completeness of biology as 
a whole. No theory so comprehensive as the evolutionary, or so- 
satisfactory, has ever been announced. 

Natural Selection is a term used by Evolutionists to include 
a great many instances of favorable opportunity enabling vic- 
tory in the battle of life. Seeds of any plant will not grow if 
thev fall upon rocks and in dry places. If the necessary soil. 



EVOLUTION. IOI 

heat and moisture is encountered by the seed it will germinate. 
If moisture only is furnished, then, in most cases, the seed will 
decay, and in these simple matters we have instances of the 
selection of Nature. Similarly cats do not live to catch rats. 
Plenty of rats will enable the raising of a larger number of cats. 
Had Daniel Webster been born in the African wilds his oratory 
would not have been heard of in civilized countries. The acci- 
dental possession of brains, location and opportunity constituted 
what natural selection did for him. Races accidentally best 
fitted to resist the diseases of a country and to cope with neigh- 
boring hostile forces are the ones to survive ; this is an instance 
of natural selection. Animals that have not some advantages 
succumb to the stronger. The mole protects himself by burrow- 
ing, the deer by his flight, natural abilities enable them to live. 
The law is capable of indefinite extension. Had Newton or 
Herschel been born before the days of telescopy and mathematics 
nature could have made no selection of their brains for our in- 
struction, at least in the ways it did. 

An old instance of the misinterpretation of matters relating 
to nature lies in the explanation of many of the polar animals 
being white. It was pointed to as an evidence of the wisdom of 
providence in enabling them to remain in their icy and snowy 
regions undiscovered by enemies. The real explanation is that 
because such animals are white their chances for escape are 
better, and in conjunction with the law of heredity it is evident 
that those animals that do escape, and only those, will propa- 
gate their kind, which, subject to the same pruning action of 
nature, ever tends to limit the color to white ; but the wolves, 
seals and many others that have size, strength, a watery medium, 
or some other advantage, remain colored. And those animals 
which change their color to a darker one when the snows melt 
and the ground is bare are still more likely to escape. 

The art of horticulture has through natural selection given us 
many varieties of apples when at one time there was only one 
original apple form. Differences and peculiar advantages have 
thus arisen in horse, cow, sheep and other branches of stock rais- 
ing. The Shetland pony is a degenerate form of the same kind 



102 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

of horse from which the Arabian has descended, both through 
natural selection processes. 

It is difficult to say often what constitutes an advantage that 
will enable Nature to select a form for survival. Sometimes 
intelligence will be serviceable, sometimes stupidity, the shell 
of the turtle is as effective toward life saving as the wings of 
the eagle. A deformity even may serve this end. Wingless birds 
like the apteryx, or practically wingless like the penguin or dodo, 
thrived because they could not fly and were not in danger of 
being blown out to sea. 

Gardeners have in the last hundred years changed, advan- 
tageously, the peculiarities of thousands of flowers and plants, 
through selection. 

The red clover, trifolium pratense, is propagated by bees 
which in search of honey fructify the flower by carrying the 
pollen of one to the stigma of another, the clover not visited by 
bees does not yield a single seed. The number of bees is deter- 
mined by the number of their enemies, the most destructive are 
the field mice. Cats destroy the mice, and Carl Vogt and Huxley 
carried out this instance of natural selection amusingly in these 
words : "Cattle which feed on clover are one of the most im- 
portant foundations of the wealth of England. Englishmen pre- 
serve their bodily and mental powers chiefly by making excel- 
lent meat, roast beef and beefsteak, their principal food. The 
English owe the superiority of their brains and minds over those 
of other nations, in a great measure, to their excellent meat. 
But this is clearly dependent upon the cats which pursue the 
mice. Old maids have a fondness for cats, and so to these old 
maids who pet cats is due the fructification of the clover and the 
prosperity of England. 

In Paraguay there are no wild horses and oxen, as in other 
contiguous parts of South America. This is explained by newly 
born animals being killed in that country by a small fly which 
does not thrive elsewhere. A little disturbance to the balance 
of life in the destruction of apparently insignificant insects may 
be attended with the most far-reaching and important conse- 
quences. This law of natural selection includes that of the sur- 
vival of the fittest. Savage races invariably die out with the 



EVOLUTION. IO3 

advent of civilization. The battle is to the strong in brain rather 
than limb, the weaker are driven to the wall and those best 
adapted live and multiply till a superior power crushes them in 
turn. The "fittest" surviving does not mean that the "best" is 
always the victor in life, for the fittest may be the scoundrel, the 
quack or the hypocrite sometimes. Ordinarily people who think- 
most and are sincere are those who appear to be the ablest to 
survive where the thoughtless would not, but during the time of 
the Spanish inquisition it was the thinking and the sincere men 
and women who were destroyed, and Spain suffers much degra- 
dation today from the survival of the "fittest'' who were enabled 
to escape the inquisition. An intellectual descent has been cut 
off in this case, for it was the unfittest to survive. 

The next most important law is Sexual Selection. It is 
through this that gaudily colored birds, like the pea fowl or birds 
of paradise, retain and even originated their colors. Song birds 
? re known to compete with their voices for mates, and the song- 
ster whose voice suited was the victor, and what was more nat- 
ural than that singing should improve through descent from 
such parents. Most animals contend for their mates with horns, 
hoofs or teeth, and combats for wives was the rule with primitive 
races of men. Nowadays the purse well filled, or some such 
allurement, is held out for the coveted lady. 

It is through the operation of this law that ugliness, deformi- 
ties, and even undesirable mental traits, are being eradicated. 
Certainly the people of this era are better favored physically and 
mentally than those of earlier ages. 

Natural selection and Sexual selection thus work together to 
conserve the useful, improve, modify, evolve new and better 
form?, with occasional retrogressive blunders. 

The law of Differentiation or Division of Labor is also worthy 
of consideration. It is by virtue of this that some men develop 
in one direction, others in another ; the advantages of black- 
smiths and lawyers, shoemakers and watchmakers keeping to 
and improving upon their separate .vocations are too evident to 
need mention, yet an application of this law of labor division 
has, till recently, been overlooked where it has been operative 



104 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

countless ages in animate things, especially in the organs which 
serve life functions in all plants and animals. 

Between the years of i860 and 1870 degenerates flocked to 
the gold fields of California and perished in large numbers. 
Many who survived increased the insane asylum population of 
the coast. Those who were starved and frozen to death in Alaska 
in their search for wealth were the unfittest to survive, though 
many may have been better men than those who succeeded and 
lived to return home. When the communistic riots broke out in 
Paris the excitable insane who exposed themselves on the barri- 
cades were killed off to such an extent that the average insane 
asylum population in France was reduced greatly for several 
years thereafter. Ordinarily the insane may be fit to survive 
when cared for, but in such instances nature finds them unfit 
and in the countless wars of earlier times the mentally unsound 
perished quickly. Unfortunately wars destroy, as though they 
were unfit to survive, people who were otherwise more worthy 
of life than many who saved their lives. 

Man has exterminated the mammoth, the urox or aurochs, 
the quagga, dodo, auk, and has nearly exterminated the okapi, 
the recently found progenitor of the giraffe, and the buffalo. 

Such instincts as the young cuckoo throwing his foster broth- 
ers from the nest so as to get all the food himself, ants making 
slaves and turning plant lice into cow-like milk givers for them- 
selves and the larvae of the ichneumonidae feeding within the live 
bodies of caterpillars, lead to advancement of organic beings in 
a physical way, by multiplying, by varying, and letting the strong- 
est live and the weakest die. An illustration of an advantage 
enabling a city to exist at a time when other places were being 
destroyed occurs in Corinth, which held a situation protecting 
it from enemies. But what may be advantage in one age may 
not be later ; for example iron armor answered very well against 
arrows and spears, but cannon balls and bomb shells made the 
picturesque armor worthless and ridiculous. "Dog in the manger 
jealousies" of neighboring nations proved an advantage to the 
otherwise weak little republic of San Marino, which survives in 
Italy like an imperium in imperio. It passed through the sov- 
ereignty of the Roman republic and empire, the Goths, the 



EVOLUTION. 105 

Greeks and the Germans, and remains free with no military or 
taxes, and since A. D. 1300 its freedom rests upon its being high 
up in the mountains and the "friendship of potentates," the sour 
grapes of Aesop's fable. 

Transplanted from the older country, where the struggle to 
exist is extreme, like that between the Siberian wolves who 
snap up the first of their pack to be wounded, Polish laborers are 
described as existing in Chicago in a deplorable state, poverty- 
stricken, ignorant, stupid, hungry and dirty, amidst industrial 
conflicts, 2 fighting one another to the death for enough to live 
upon. 

Misconceptions of the law of survival incessantly occur. Nat- 
urally the sincere student thinks that if he fits himself honestly 
and fully for his profession he will be rewarded by employment. 
He is in error, for his fitness to practice does not mean that he 
is the fittest to succeed. He may deserve to succeed and be 
known to those w T ho are capable of judging to be able and 
skillful, but the people upon whom he depends for pay for serv- 
ices are not informed, and the unscrupulous charlatan imposes 
upon the ignorant public and revels in wealth obtained by deceit 
and injury to his fellows, where the best man, the one who could 
have done real service, was left in poverty and unrecognized. 

Then in matters of dress we have survivals from many ages. 
Ear-rings come down to us from savage days and bracelets indi- 
cated at one time that the wearers were slaves. When the young 
officer puts on his sword belt he is surprised at the convenience 
of the two buttons on the back of his coat, and is unaware that 
those buttons are a survival from a time when gentlemen wore 
swords and were retained after swords went out of fashion. The 
lower set of buttons were used to hold the coat-tails out of the 
way when it was customary to carry the sword blade between 
the legs. Similarly when times degenerate, as -they always do 
when a war breaks out, or as they may be said to revert to for- 
mer conditions, it is surprising how readily we become barbarians 
or savages, and an argument against a standing army in time 
of peace could be that man is a natural soldier and needs little 
training for warfare. Certain ideas may suddenly take root such 

2 1. K. Friedman, by Bread Alone, 1901. 



106 tup: evolution of* man and his mind. 

as caused the crusades in the nth and later centuries and be 
the fittest to survive because appealing to the emotions of a 
similarly constituted set of people, though belonging to different 
nations and times. The Mohammedan teaching is so simple and 
appeals so directly to the ignorant heart and passions of crude 
Arabians that when first taught it took like wild-fire and created 
the vast Ottoman and Mohammedan empires. One God, the right 
to enslave or exterminate enemies, an absolute claim to the wealth 
of the world and assurance of inheriting a future life, with all 
the enjoyment of this life multiplied, are the inducements held 
out to the "common sense" of these higher kinds of apes, with 
whom we have much in common and whom we resemble more 
than we like to admit. 

Many things that are unaccountable can be explained by this 
principle of survival. For example, the English hostler will hiss 
while currying his horse and the Western cowboy hisses when he 
tries to stop a runaway pony. Connecting these matters with 
the fact that the hiss of the rattlesnake often causes a horse to 
halt, to enable him to locate and escape from the reptile, the 
origin of the custom may be explained, though not suspected by 
the hostler or cowboy. Oaths and imprecations or ejaculations 
in all likelihood come down to us through untold ages of excla- 
mations, roars, grunts, howls, etc., of progenitors who expressed 
their surprise in terse and rude ways. Swearing, deep, loud or 
whispered, is like the lion's roar, the jackal's snarl, the spit of 
the cat, and the growl of the dog ; and the kind of oath used 
may outlive the ideas of the people who originally used it. For 
example, many a German today when excited exclaims : "Don- 
nerwetter," which, when the "thunder god'' was reverenced by 
the primitive Teutons could have been rank blasphemy, further- 
more the Latins and Germans are more careless than the English 
in using the name of God unnecessarily, as a survival from times 
when the Christian's God was not reverenced at all. 

Just as birds come from lizards, and yet we have reptiles to- 
day, and as horses came from carnivores, and we have flesh- 
eating animals today ; and the sharks, fishes and marsupials still 
survive through which man and apes developed, so thousands of 
vears hence, whatever civilization mav be then, lower types will 



EVOLUTION. 



107 



doubtless remain, though the rule is that the lower dies out in 
the presence of the more exalted. It would be hard to find con- 
ditions to which Natural Selection does not apply. In every 
branch of life there is contention with destruction of the unsuc- 
cessful and the triumph of the successful. Vast fields of plants 
grow rank and large in the tropics where heat and moisture 
favor, and both plants and animals fight there for supremacy. 
In the Arctics the mosses and algae alone survive the frost, and 
farther north no animals or plants can exist. 

Things develop or retrograde. Ideas grow and are throttled 
or live for a while, or even for centuries, to be supplanted by 
others better suited to new conditions. What may be consid- 
ered evil develops, differentiates, succeeds alongside of condi- 
tions people may consider good, and both good and evil develop 
and contend for place. So in yourself there is a fight between 
inclinations and principles, and it depends upon circumstances 
as to which may dominate. And both so-called good and evil 
develop for the same reasons, differentiation and specialization, 
and they combat one another because of opportunity and self- 
interest. For instance, some police chiefs of large cities take 
bribes from policemen for "soft beats" and they blackmail street- 
walkers, saloons and thieves, proceedings ranking as bad in the 
abstract, but it is such a tax upon crime that criminals cannot 
afford to do business, so that in the end it amounts to the same 
as though the law had been enforced, and what may be called 
"good" may thus spring from official thieves fighting unofficial 
crime in this way, with the occasional hauling up before a grand 
jury of the official thieves, or the upsetting of a rotten city gov- 
ernment by hysterical reformers. 

As some faculties or organs develop or some forms of life do 
also it may be at the expense of other faculties, organs, or living 
things. Encroachments of nations upon each other often result 
in the shrinking or extermination of one and growth of the other. 
An interesting discussion of forest rotation or the disposition one 
set of seeds in the soil have to succeed another kind when the 
conditions are more favorable for the successor, is given by 
Campbell 1 , the larches and beeches being displaced by pines and 

crican Naturalist, 1886. p. 521 and p. 651. 



108 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

firs, and these in turn by oak trees, showing natural selection con- 
ditions at certain periods favor the growth from certain kinds of 
seeds, which of course are previously in the soil awaiting their 
turn to sprout and develop. Beavers are now becoming extinct in 
America as they were also hunted out of existence in Holland in 
1825. Brown rats expel the black rats from countries, and they 
are enemies, though rats and mice live together in corn stacks ami- 
cably. The Norwegian rat has successfully chased other species 
from almost all countries. Hippopotami and reindeer remains 
are found side by side in several regions in England, and some 
fossil skulls are found in the west of the United States with a 
sword-like lower tusk curved in its growth till -it penetrated the 
brain of its owner, and to this may be assigned the extermina- 
tion of the species, an unfortunate kind of natural selection which 
may have been brought about by sexual selection, that is the 
curved tusk may have attracted mates as ornamental, but, like 
many other luxuries and embellishments favored by the gentler 
sex, it proved fatal in the end to its possessor. There has been 
an astonishing destruction of buffalo in America, known as bison 
in Europe. Bison disappeared from Britain earlier than did the 
aurochs. In 1500 bison were plenty in Poland, and a remnant 
exists in the Caucasus today, and our Yellowstone Park preserves 
survivors of the once vast herds. Bison ranged from Siberia into 
Alaska and abounded in the black forest in the time of Julius 
Caesar, and in the 10th century they were eaten in Switzerland 
and Germany. The skulls of aurochs fifty inches across have 
been found in the peat bogs, pierced with flint hatchets, in Brit- 
ain, Scotland and the continent, as far south as Greece. The 
wingless bird, the auk, was extinguished in the last century. 
An extinct marsupial resembling the Kangaroo walked on all 
fours, and extinct elephant remains are found in Pliestocene Eu- 
rope from Yorkshire to Algeria. A northern sea-cow or manati 
was so helpless and stupid it was quickly exterminated in the 
1 8th century. Sturgeons appeared in the upper Eocene period 
and notwithstanding their slaughter is incessant and prodigious 
they are the fittest to survive today, because they increase more 
rapidly than they can be killed off. They are exceedingly vora- 
cious, and the majority are carnivores and, like salmon males, 



EVOLUTION, 



og 



often eat their own young. Sturgeons were formerly in the 
Danube by the thousands, but they have been reduced not only 
in numbers but in size also, though even now fish of 1200 to 1500 
lbs. are occasionally caught there. A river 400 ft. wide has been 
blocked, in Russia, by solid masses of sturgeons in their migra- 
tions. They evidently possess some advantage that causes them 
to be selected by nature to survive in spite of hostile surround- 
ings that rapidly reduce other forms of life. While there is 
inheritance to fix the kinds of animals and plants so that descend- 
ant- will resemble their ancestors, there is also the departure 
from exact resemblance we see all about us in living things, and 
this is known as Variability. Just as people do not exactly re- 
semble one another externally in their features, limbs, complex- 
ions, and so on, so internally there are equivalent departures from 
the fixed types of muscles, arteries, etc., and owing to sexual 
selection having nothing to do with internal organs, and natural 
selection permitting any kind of feature to survive and be trans- 
mitted that satisfied conditions of life even imperfectly, the truth 
of the claim of Wolff that internal organs are more variable than 
the external could be explained. Ear variability is accounted for 
by Darwin as due to the indifference of sexes as to this feature, 
hence sexual selection does not influence its shape. The variability 
of minds of men is very great, even in the same race, and among 
dogs the greatest difference of character can be seen. Brehm 
says each monkey has his individual temper and disposition. He 
mentions one baboon remarkable for its high intelligence. Much 
mental capacity is innate and education and treatment may de- 
velop it. Insanity and deteriorated mental powers run in fami- 
lies, as in the case of the Spanish Hapsburgs and Romanoffs of 
Austria and Russia. Domesticated animals vary more than do 
wild animals, owing to the variability of conditions. Races may 
also run down or develop better under diverse states. Rank and 
occupation make changes in character. Wealth too often causes 
feebleness of mind by disuse. Better food and comfort increase 
stature, and w r hen a race attains its highest physical development 
Bcddoe says it "rises highest in energy and normal vigor." Sun- 
light and heat have but small influence in producing color even 
during ages. With animals cold and damp affect their hair 



IIO THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

growth. Use strengthens muscles and disuse degenerates them. 
When an artery is tied its branches develop, a lost kidney or lung 
causes the other to increase in size and bones increase in length 
and thickness by carrying greater weight. The longer legs of 
man as compared with those of tree-climbing apes could be readily 
ascribed to the progenitor of early man having often abandoned 
the forests and coursed over plains, steppes and savannahs in 
chasing prey and escaping from enemies, and thus developing 
the length of legs and their muscularity over former states. Gre- 
cian statuary shows the calf muscle but little developed as com- 
pared with the modern condition, and so a very few centuries 
have added size to this part. Spencer says the jaws of savages 
are larger through eating coarse and uncooked food. The "high 
cheek bones" of some individuals can be readily referred to the 
jaw T bone muscle having undergone reduction in size, as when 
cooked food w r as more largely used and strong muscles were less 
needed, w T hile the bony prominence known as the malar, on the 
cheek, had not diminshed in size as did the associated muscle. 
The skin on the soles of infants' feet are thicker than elsewhere 
due to a long series of generations of pressure, while hardness is 
developed on animals in different parts according to mechani- 
cal use. Corns and callosities are of this nature and are quite vari- 
able. The change of environment may not only cause variability 
but a change that will create species or families very different 
from the ancestral. In great sea depths are blind and other fishes 
with phosphorescent organs that give out light, and they also have 
enormous stomachs. Soft and flabby and often with starting 
eyes, when they accidentally come to the sea surface, at their usual 
levels they are compact. Deep sea fish certainly live at a depth 
of 2,750 fathoms. Cave fishes are also found to have lost the use 
of their eyes, and members of the same family are marine, and 
among the latter are two rare species found at great depths in the 
southern oceans which are also completely blind and are provided 
with phosphorescent organs. There is a ribbon fish of the deep 
sea and a "frost fish" which is said to commit suicide by strand- 
ing itself on shore. A phosphorescent sardine lives in great 
depths and ascends to the sea surface at night only. Their phos- 
phorescence serves to guide such fishes and to attract prey as the 



EVOLUTION. 1 I I 

torch docs for the fisherman. Rudimentary parts occur in animals 
through disuse. For instance, man has three little muscles at- 
tached to his external car that are of no use to him, hut in apes 
and other forms with movahle ears these muscles serve to move 
the ear upward, backward and forward. A slender muscle along- 
side of the calf of the leg is so useless that its tendon hangs un- 
attached, while it was of considerahle importance in lower forms 
as an aid in climbing trees by contracting the foot like a hand 
clasping. Chickens have this plantaris muscle well developed to 
enable them to roost. Cows and similar ruminants, or animals 
that chew the cud, have front incisor teeth under their gums 
that never appear, and this indicates that they descended from 
ancestors which had front teeth. Whales have quite rudimentary 
teeth that are never cut, and from this fact and others it is known 
that whales come from a land animal that had well formed teeth. 
Beneath the skin of a snake-like reptile there are small legs that 
never appear on the surface. The only possible significance of 
these undeveloped legs would be in their having been useful to 
the progenitor of this snake-like reptile, but had ceased to be so 
in the descendant. Just as active brains served their possessors 
to amass riches which handed down to heirs who had no particu- 
lar use for brain activity served merely to raise incapable idlers. 
Some monkeys have no thumbs and there is a tendency of the 
last joint of the big toe of orangs to be shed, the toe not being 
so useful in grasping and useless parts being inclined to cease 
growth. There is an ape called the proboscis monkey that has a 
ridiculously large nose of no possible use to him and a positive 
deformity. It is apparently a survival from some source, or an 
extra growth such as corns and warts. The nipples of male quad- 
rupeds are instances of rudimentary organs. Monkeys can move 
their scalps up and down and a few human beings can also do 
so, but in most the power is lost, while the muscles concerned in 
the movement remain in an undeveloped state. The ear muscles 
mentioned are as rudimentary and useless in the chimpanzee and 
orang as they are in man. The horse has a sheet muscle called 
the panniculus carnosus, enabling it to shake flies off its body. 
Man has a rudiment of this same muscle around his neck and in 
general parts of his skin, but can make no use of it. The anatom- 



112 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ical name for it is platysma myoides. The vermiform appendix 
is rudimentary in man, affording the modern fashionable disorder 
called appendicitis. In the Kaola this branch of the intestine is 
three times as long as the body and is also long in vegetable 
feeders. By change in habits this appendix becomes shortened 
to a dangerously small rudiment sometimes causing death. It is 
better developed in women than in men. Mankind differs from 
other primates in being almost naked. Most men have but little 
hair on their bodies while women have only a fine down. These 
hairs are a rudiment of a former general hairy condition which 
occasionally recurs in some people. Downy hairs may be devel- 
oped into stiff long coarse hairs near an inflamed surface and long 
hairs in the eyebrows may be inherited, resembling those of the 
chimpanzee and macacus. On the sixth month human embryo 
there is a fine furry covering called lanugo, which first comes on 
the face and eyebrows at the fifth month and around the mouth, 
where it is longer than on the head ; arrest of hair development 
with teeth abnormality may be followed by lanugo hair returning 
in the adult. The back wisdom teeth tend to become rudimentary 
and do not cut earlier than the 17th year in the adult, and in other 
ways show their differences from the other teeth. In some lower 
races these teeth are sound and resemble the others in regularity 
and serviceability. The prostate gland at the base of the bladder 
in man is a rudimentary uterus and after the sixtieth year of life 
occasionally gives great trouble and distress by enlarging. There 
is great variability in rudimentary organs because being useless 
they are no longer subject to natural selection, they often be- 
come entirely suppressed, though by reversion they may reappear 
just as moles on the body are reappearances of part of the an- 
cestral monkey-like skin and hair. The main cause of rudiments 
is disuse at a period when the organ is chiefly used, usually at 
maturity ; a diminished nutrition, as by a cut off blood supply, 
may also make an otherwise active organ rudimentary. Natural 
selection by developing certain parts may render other parts less 
useful, whereupon they are liable to become rudimentary. Organs 
in the process of development need not be permanently rudi- 
mentary, and such may be called "nascent" or capable of develop- 
ment. A child's organs are generally in this formative stage and 



EYOLl'TIOX. 



I J 3 



the majority of human beings may be said to have nascent brains, 
inasmuch as they have allowed them to remain unfilled with 
knowledge, and unexercised as apparatus of thought. The Jap- 
anese also could be considered a nascent nation until the United 
States led them out of their seclusion and gave them a chance to 
use their very capable but latent, unused, abilities. 

The similarity of pattern between the hand of a man or mon- 
key, the foot of a horse, the flipper of a seal, and the wing of a 
bat, show the relationship and derivation of species one from an- 
other. Mere superficial inspection or a careless glance will not 
enable these likenesses to be seen, but a very little study of the 
internal parts of these appendages will convince you that they are 
built upon a single plan. But still more striking are the resem- 
blances between the unborn young of the man, dog, seal, bat, 
reptile, bird and fish, so that at certain stages these embryos can 
hardly be told one from the other. 

Ernst Hseckel traces the evolution of plants from the lowest 
formation to the highest during the geological periods called 
Laurentian, Devonian, Coal, Permian and Triassic, as furnishing 
respectively the simple to the complex growths of vegetation 
known as algae, mosses, ferns, conifers, and flowering plants. In 
his very interesting History of Creation he also gives an account 
of the animals in their geological succession from the oldest form- 
ations of the earth's surface to the more recent. Thus the vast 
multitude of back-boneless animals date from the Laurentian 
period : the Cambrian furnishes the headless animals, the Acrania, 
a step higher: the Silurian age gave us eels, sharks, ganoids; the 
Devonian brought the bony fishes, the amphioxus or "lancelet" 
is found to date from the Coal period ; during the Permian the 
reptiles appeared, and some of them developed into birds in the 
Triassic epoch, while in the Jurassic there dawned upon the 
higher animal life the great division of mammalia. 

The growth of the plant from the seed and of the animal from 
the egg is an evolutionary process and is technically called onto- 
geny or individual development, and the evolution of a higher 
form of existence from a lower form, whether plants or animals, 
is called phylogeny. Ontogeny or the individual growth is a 
rapid, brief copying, in a few months or years, of phylogeny, or 



114 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

the history of what has taken place through sometimes millions 
of years, in the lifting of the higher from the lower kind of plant 
or animal. 

Heredity, which transmits like peculiarities, and adaptation or 
nutrition, in the environment or surroundings most suitable to 
afford such nutrition, are strong factors in this building up pro- 
cess both for the individual and the race. One of the often used 
questions intended to confuse the evolutionist was : "If man 
descended from monkeys what has become of the tail?" Xo 
claim is made that man is descended from monkevs bv any well 
informed evolutionist. That both the monkey and man come 
from similar ancestry is all that can be properly claimed, and as 
to the tails, the four higher apes, namely, the chimpanzee, orang, 
gibbon and gorilla, have no tails, neither has the Barbary macaque 
which is a much lower animal, and bv way of return to an orig- 
inal condition it occasionally happens that the little bones called 
the coccxy, at the end of the spine of man develop into a well- 
defined tail. This Barbary macaque or magot is the pithecus of 
the ancients, described by Aristotle. It was dissected by Galen 
and threw light upon human anatomy, and from it came the 
knowledge of anatomy secured by the Greeks. The whole sub- 
ject of why some monkeys have tails and others have none, and 
why some tails are short and others are long is enveloped in great 
obscurity. All monkeys that swing by their tails are American. 
This ability to grasp limbs by the caudal appendage is called pre- 
hensile, so that old world monkeys do not have prehensile tails 
while the new world monkeys own them. But monkeys are not 
the only animals thus provided, for two lizard species from 
Jamaica and Columbia also have prehensile tails. The various 
kinds of monkey's tails are classed as prehensile, drooping, curl- 
ing over the body, bushy like the squirrel, short like the pig, lion- 
tailed, and no tail, as in the higher apes and macaque. Darwin 
remarks that when the beard of man or monkeys differs from the 
hair of the head the beard will be lighter in color, 4 and quotes Cat- 
lin's estimate of eighteen out of twenty North American Indians 
being beardless, and when there is neglect to pluck the hairs at' 

4 Descent of Man, p. 304. 



EVOLUTION. 115 

puberty a soft hoard may appear an inch or two inches long. In 
both sexes ol" these Indians the hair of the head is long. 

Beards are quite variable in different races, and among our- 
selves, and the different kinds of beards and ihe want of them 
Darwin describes at length. 5 Apes and monkeys are four-handed, 
that is, they use their feet to grasp with and to climb trees, and this 
ability of clutching with the feet is seen in young human infants 
and. in some adults of low races, like the Cingalese. Monkeys do 
not hibernate but are active during all seasons : some o'l the;:: are 
expert swimmers. In some the thumb is missing, the hand of the 
ateles being used as a hook to swing from trees ; the thumb has 
become useless and this species sometimes conveys food to its 
mouth with its tail. The long arms of the orang are adaptations 
to the necessity for tree climbing, just as the longer legs of man 
are better suited to life on the ground. All the monkeys have 
two breasts like the human except the aye-aye of Madagascar, 
and the teeth are the same in man and monkeys. The man-like 
apes and the Siamang have hair on the forearm that runs toward 
the elbow as it does in man, and it has been suggested that the 
dripping of rain from the elbow point through vast ages finally 
fixed the direction of these hairs. The calves of the legs are more 
developed in the gorilla than in any of the other man-like apes. 
Generally speaking there is a greater relative size of the brain and 
that part of the skull which contains it, in the monkeys than in 
other animals, but the lower monkeys are not equal in intelligence 
to the higher flesh eating animals. The marked differences of 
appearance between the monkeys are associated with correspond- 
ing mental differences. The larger species' resemblance to man 
is more marked in the young than in the adult, while the females 
have more human characteristics than the male. This is due to 
the general resemblance between all the higher apes and the 
human infant, changing somewhat with age, and the females of 
all species retaining youthful peculiarities. 

The most intelligent of all apes is the chimpanzee, specimens 
of which have been exhibited at times in our larger cities, but 
they do not live many years in captivity. They sleep in trees 
and make a covering over their heads like a hut to shelter them 

5 Op. Cit. p. 306. 



Il6 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

from rain. They do not eat flesh but feed on nuts and other 
fruits. They have been observed sitting around abandoned camp 
fires which they do not know enough to replenish. Old accounts 
made them very hostile to negroes who travel in the same forests, 
and their strength was said to be very great. Africans claimed 
that troops of chimpanzees chased and beat elephants with their 
fists and sticks. In captivity they are gentle, intelligent and affec- 
tionate, and soon learn to feed themselves with spoon, glass or 
cup, and are quite playful. One of them called negroes "bun, 
bun, bun." They sleep upon their backs and in many other re- 
spects resemble human beings. 

Hseckel derives all apes from a half-ape form, and from these 
developed the flap-tailed, flat-nosed apes, from whom came the 
silky kind and the clutch-tailed American apes, which ended that 
particular bough of the family tree. The tailed narrow-nosed 
apes gave origin to the cynocephalus baboon on one finished 
branch and the cercopithecus on another branch. A more impor- 
tant offshoot between these two afforded the tail apes on one twig 
and the nose apes on another, and from these tailed narrow-nosed 
apes sprung the important anthropoids or man-like apes, from 
which came the African man-like chimpanzee and gorilla at the 
highest end of that particular branch, while a parallel branch 
divides into the gibbon and orang, a totally distinct branch orig- 
inated the ape-like speechless man, and this branch split into two 
divisions according to Haeckers classification of the human family 
into straight-haired and woolly-haired races of men. 

Both man and the man-like apes are thus regarded as diverg- 
ing branches descended from a common ancestor which has long 
since become extinct. This ancestor or half-ape was as unlike any 
living ape-like animal as the apes of today are unlike men. Nor 
is it required that we should believe our progenitors to have been 
any single set of half-apes or lemurs. Many such lemurs sim- 
ilarly and favorably situated may at the same time or through 
long separate periods of time, have become the parents of other 
ape-like forms which developed the different races of men, and 
these tribes could also have appeared separately in regions far 
distant from one another without necessarily owning a common 
origin or having emigrated from some far off land. Like causes 



EVOLUTION. 117 

produce like effects and it is simpler to conceive of man appear- 
ing in Australia. Africa, Europe and Asia independently, devel- 
oped from separate ancestry, even though in later ages crossings 
occurred and the races ceased to be distinct. 

There is a white race of lemurs in the moist regions of Mada- 
gascar and a black race in the dry regions. Milne-Edwards and 
Grandidier mentioned the remarkable diversity of races and spe- 
cies of different lemurs, so that a small river may separate mark- 
edly different kinds of these half-apes. The distribution in France 
and England in the early part of the Tertiary of fossil lemurs indi- 
cates the prevalence in those countries of a tropical or sub-tropi- 
cal climate at that time. Fossil gibbons are found in the fresh 
water strata belonging to the middle portion of the Tertiary per- 
iod in France and Switzerland. So that part of Europe must 
have had a hot, moist climate like that of the Malay archipelago 
of the present day. Other kinds of monkey fossils are abundant 
in Europe later in the Tertiary, though there are no gibbons after 
the Miocene division. Fossil apes are not found further back 
than the Miocene age, but man-like apes are found in the Miocene 
rocks. 

The chimpanzee of Africa was considered the highest in intel- 
ligence of the four higher apes, but Hoeckel in his later researches 
announces the gibbon of Java as superior to all apes and regards 
it as the nearest living relative of man among the animals. He 
speaks of it as man's first cousin. In 1866 Hseckel declared that 
man was descended from an ape-like animal and described a miss- 
ing link in the chain of evolution, which he named pithecanthro- 
pus. In 1894 the remains of this creature were discovered by Dr. 
Dubois in Java, who named it pithecanthropus erectus. There 
existed once an Asiatic ape, now extinct, who became the pro- 
genitor of pithecanthropus, the gibbon and the orang outang. 
The descendants of pithecanthropus evolved into man, but the 
gibbon remained as he was. He seems a sad animal, timi 1, mel- 
ancholy and intelligent, fond of children, with a strong tendency 
to jealousy and all the other human emotions. The Java speci- 
men is called Hylobates leuciscus. 

The great collection of islands south and southeast of Asia 
called the Indian or Malay archipelago includes the large islands 



I lS THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

of Java, Sumatra and Borneo. It «was in Java that Dr.. Dubois 
found the remains of pithecanthropus erectus, a missing link, and 
judging from the geological formation in which the bones were 
found the pithecanthropus is thought to have lived about 270,000 
years ago. These islands also contain the only existing families 
of the Asiatic man-like apes- the orang and gibbon. This near 
relative of ours is pleasanter in manners than are the other high 
apes. Whether these islands of the Malay archipelago were for- 
merly connected with the main land or not it appears that this 
vicinity was favorable to the development of higher animal life. 
There is a stretch of tropical forest from Borneo and the Malay 
peninsula to the Himalaya mountains, and this region suggests 
itself favorably as the home of the primitive ape-man who de- 
scended from the pithecanthropus of Java. Wallace shows that 
a large part of this region of southeastern Asia with the islands of 
the Indian Ocean affords abundance of the same kinds of ani- 
mals. Other parts of the world may have been favorable to the 
evolution of men-like apes and varieties of ape-like men, but the 
best adapted place on the earth's surface appeared to have been 
the Himalaya range from southeast to northwest and the high 
plateaus of Thibet and the plains southwest of the Hindu-Kush 
mountains near the northwest part of the Himalayas. Darwin 
places the divergence of man from the catarrhine, sharp or narrow- 
nosed apes as occurring in the Eocene period in a hot country. 
The sadness and timidity of the gibbon may be ascribed partly to 
its gloomy forest life and being surrounded by hosts of fierce ani- 
mals from whom it must protect itself, and added to this the 
violent convulsions of nature frequent in its early times made this 
lower part of Asia an uncomfortable district. The proboscis mon- 
key is very likely a creature of sexual selection. Ideas of beauty 
vary even among men and a startlingly large nose may have won 
attention and preference of the sexes so that mating w T ith the less 
prominent nosed apes went out of fashion among them until 
that species was well founded and achieved its greatest and only 
distinction, for it amounts to little in other respects. But with 
pithecanthropus a less prominent nose coupled with alertness was 
more in favor and so both natural and sexual selection devel- 
oped along the intellectual line these earliest progenitors of man. 



EVOLUTION. 



II 9 



A solemn old rascal is the sacred monkey of India, the Hanu- 
man, Hulman, named by Cuvier, Semnopithecus entellus. The 
Hindoos credit it with all sorts of impossible powers, a kind of 
Perseus and Prometheus in one, as it is said to have delivered a 
goddess from a giant's captivity and to have presented the mango 
to India. The pious Hindoo never molests it but allows it the 
run oi the garden and house where it destroys to its heart's con- 
tent. English officers feel compelled to suppress the nuisance 
and intelligent natives approve of so doing, but the pious would 

s - < >n kill a human being as one of these sacred animals. 

* Wild animals that avoid mixing will often, when domesti- 
cated, cross, as can be observed when the various kinds of dogs 
mingle, the original Eskimo clog being merely an arctic wolf, 
the Indian dog a prairie wolf, the Nubian a jackal, the ancient 
lake dwellers also domesticating that animal. The horse of Asia 
and Europe plainly arose separately from the American horse, the 
fossil evidence showing that in the west territories of the United 
States the horse began as an animal the size of a cat, remains of 
which are found in the Wasatch beds of Eocene times. Later on 
mesohippus attained the size of a sheep, the next growth, pro- 
tohippus, had a skeleton closely like that of the present horse, 
into which protohippus grew in Pliocene times when there was 
no man to ride him. All the American horses died off before the 
European stock came over. The few herds of wild horses in Xew 
[Mexico and that vicinity descended from cavalry animals lost 
by Cortez and later Spaniards in [Mexico. Professor E. D. Cope 
of Philadelphia found the earliest five-toed horse progenitor of 
the later kinds, and a remarkable thing about it was that it was a 
flesh eater, so circumstances must have compelled the recent horse 
to subsist upon grass. x\s to the simultaneous or rather independ- 
ent evolution of life in far distant parts, though there may be a 
remarkable sameness of appearance of these separate forms, there 
is found the same variety of lichen in the antarctic as in the arctic 
regions and it is more likely that they developed from similar 
than from the same causes. 

One can picture to himself mountains thrust up from a hot sea 
with tropical forms of both plants and animals becoming arctic 
forms as they came out of the ocean and climbed the ranges 



120 THE EVOLUTION OE MAN AND HIS MIND. 

through ages measured by many hundreds of thousands of years, 
certainly time enough for some sort of changes to occur, even 
though the change were from crawling to flying lizards and these 
finally into birds, the mountain sides affording all sorts of induce- 
ment and opportunity for such metamorphosis and the fossils 
found in rocks proving that such things did occur. So gradually 
hot blooded animals appeared from cold blooded ancestry ; the 
reptiles being furnished exterior heat and such animals as were 
able to furnish their own caloric internally were able to do more 
and to develop widely and higher in the animal and mental scales, 
until hot blooded birds soar through the clouds and hot blooded 
man scaled the glaciers and became master of the world, though 
at the cost of much effort and multitudes of slain marking his 
temporary failures. The mountain sides have seen the four- 
footed progenitors of man, the man-like ape and the ape-like man 
next in descent, speechless animal man finally learning to talk 
and to use better and still better tools and to make his surround- 
ings better as his mind developed, and all this took vast periods 
of time, hundreds of thousands of years. The remains of an 
ancient civilization scattered over the west coast of South Amer- 
ica, the Isthmus and Mexico point to Honduras, Yucatan and 
Columbia as centers of such life, though its remoter source was 
in mountain ranges more or less adjacent, the Andes ; the high 
plains of Thibet doubtless were the abode of the fathers of the 
Aryans who slowly ventured down into the Oxus valley as the 
hot sea went down and the melting glaciers made a river far 
wider than any we know of today, the sea still falling leaves fer- 
tile plains for thousands of years upon which these Aryans 
browse their flocks, but finally the crumbling mountains made so 
much sand that blows over the grassy plains and forms the des- 
erts, the inhabitants are compelled to leave, and so Europe came 
to be settled, but not wholly from that people. To the south 
there were also highlands near Armenia where the stock proba- 
bly originated from which came many of the subsequent dwellers 
in the great Mesopotamian valley, with a history very like that 
of the Oxus region, the Euphrates filling the wide expanse and 
the Semites coming down from where their legends locate their 
paradise, the Persian plateaux, the waters going farther, with 



EVOLUTION. [21 

an occasional return, affording the legend of the flood ; finally 
two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, developing from the one 

wide one as the glaciers melted and the valleys became fertile, 
and eventually bad times, through climatic and soil changes and 
eternal fights with the wild Kurds, made Babylonia too poor a 
place to live in, so its folk scattered elsewhere. These Aryans 
and Semites have made all the important history of the world, 
as far as civilization, with which we are familiar, is concerned. 
Just so the ancient great Ural mountains extending northward to 
the Arctic ocean could have developed the Tartars along the Ural 
river as the Caspian became an inland sea from the receding of 
the primeval general ocean, the Altai range north of China bring- 
ing up the Mongols, with whom the Tartars mixed to afford the 
later Ural-Altain people, who bothered the Aryans and Semites 
to the south so much. 

The Norwegian ranges and some others may have similarly 
seen the appearance of indigenous men, but the probabilities are 
that the Aryans killed them off, and it seems likely that other 
Asiatics than Aryans preceded and mixed with these aborigines, 
but they shared the same fate when these masterful travelers 
from the Oxus put in an appearance. They were the fittest to 
survive. 

The Atlas and Abyssinian mountains might just as readily have 
begun some of the African races, and also ranges farther south 
could have raised Hottentots and other blacks, the subsequent 
intermarriages of races about the Mediterranean accounting for 
varieties of complexions. Furthermore, some of the less fav- 
ored races may not have developed until their ancestral forms 
had come down into forests or plains at low altitudes, which may 
account for darker complexions in some cases. The high cold 
ranges affording the more intelligent white races, the hot moist 
forests other peoples in some instances. 

Darwin 6 ascribes the greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity 
and even energy of man as compared with the same qualities in 
women to primitive times. A frequent disposition of man to be 
willing to fight to the death for the woman he loves can be re- 
ferred back to such early days, and the so-called chivalry of the 

6 Descent of Man, Ch. XX, pt. II. 



122 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

middle ages was thus aroused and survives today in a less bom- 
bastic and otherwise improved form. Beards Darwin regards as 
appendages transmitted to males by sexual selection as the sweeter 
voices of women were similarly transmitted with their denuda- 
tion of hair. 

Primitive times favored sexual development more than recent 
days because man was guided then more by instinctive passions 
and less by foresight and reason. Darwin concludes that of all 
the causes which have led to the differences in external appear- 
ance between the races of man and to a certan extent between 
man and the lower animals sexual selection has been by far the 
most efficient. Carl Vogt 7 vigorously discusses the claims of the 
monogenists, or those who believe that different types have arisen 
from a single individual, as in the wrong, that different continents 
may have simultaneously produced representatives or similar spe- 
cies, and that we should not accept a single center of creation for 
all animals. 

Wallace s accepts Croll's hypothesis that the glacial period 
began about 200,000 years ago and adopts Sir Wm. Thompson's 
conclusion that the crust of the earth cannot have been solidified 
much longer than a hundred million years and that Prof. Haugh- 
ton's estimate of the time required to produce the thickness of the 
stratified rocks of the globe, 177,200 feet, at the present rate of 
denudation and deposition is only twenty-eight million years. 
Four million years can be assigned to the Tertiary epoch and six- 
teen million for the time elapsed since the Cambrian, according 
to Lyell, or sixty million, according to Dana. The twenty-eight 
million arrived at from the rate of denudation and deposition is 
midway between these. 

Wallace considers the present climate as exceptionally stable 
and that species are also stable in consequence. He discards the 
well-nigh limitless geological periods and far fetched inter-con- 
tinental bridges and temporary islands and the hypothetical Lem- 
uria of Hseckel, and inclines to regard the present continents and 
ocean basins as permanent. American geologists are familiar 
with the idea of the origin of the North American continent from 

7 Westermann's Monatshefte, 1881. 
'Island Life, 1881. 



EVOLUTION. 123 

the Laurentian nucleus and its gradual building up by sediments 
derived fr.un the waste of its own rocks, and keeping pace with it 
was the evolution of its flora and fauna which borrowed nothing 
from the old world, though South America may have exchanged 
some forms. It was not till the Tertiary that the American and 
Asiatic continents nearly met, so that interchanges of forms were 
slight, if any. 

Simultaneously with the growth of North and South America 
the Europeo-Asiatic, African and Australian continents are pre- 
sumed to have developed with their characteristic assemblages of 
plants and animals. 

The American continent had its own marsupials, tapirs, cats, 
dogs, horses, camels and monkeys, independent of those arising 
in Europe and Asia ; and Cope 9 regards this independent evolu- 
tion idea of Wallace and Vogt as explaining matters simply, 
which otherwise could not be explained. During the glacial 
period when the American and Asiatic continents approached 
each other there may have been migration and interchanges, 
which render the life in the northern hemisphere so different in 
the Ouarternary from that of the Tertiary. With the modern 
facilities for mixing of species and the driving out of the unfit- 
test there are rapidly occurring extinctions, as of the buffalo in 
America, as the aurochs was driven from Asia and Europe. A 
remnant of the British black rat, almost entirely exterminated 
during the last hundred years by the brown Norwegian rat, is 
carefully protected and preserved on an estate at Greenlees, Mont- 
gomery. Natural selection is in favor of the sparrows and against 
the survival of the wrens, who are driven away by the sparrows. 10 
There is a natural rotation of crops of forest trees due to the soil 
being successively better adapted with the climate and the presence 
of certain seeds to the growth and propagation of the successive 
sorts, the oak following the pine, so that alternate sections of the 
Northern Pacific present the two kinds of forests, due to the 
oak springing up where the pines had been cut away. 11 Wallace 12 

'American Naturalist, April, 18S1. 
, " T. Mcllwraith, American Naturalist, Aug., 1883, p. 894. 

11 American Naturalist, 1886, p. 521. 

12 Natural Selection. 



124 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

regards the development of the human race under the law of nat- 
ural selection and refers to the influence of external nature in the 
growth of the human mind, whereby the inhabitants of the tem- 
perate regions are superior to those of hotter countries and all 
changes for the better coming from the north. He refers to this 
matter of natural selection operating in the extinction of lower 
races, and in originating the races of men ; he discusses its bear- 
ing upon antiquity, as the cause of man's dignity and supremacy. 
Wallace gives his view of the brain of the savage, his range of 
intellect, the origin of his moral sense, of consciousness, and 
surveys the antiquity and origin of man. 

The Chinese are capable of some instruction when young, 
but their brains appear to crystalize as a survival of conditions 
common to their very remote ancestry, and no further progress 
can be made with them. The Japanese are immeasurably the 
superior of the Chinese. 

In Syria they still plow with the same kind of crooked stick 
of prehistoric days, they thrash grain by hoofed animals walkmg 
on it and winnow by tossing the grain in the air to let tke * ind 
blow the chaff away, and yet barbarous, ill-smelling, superstitious, 
uncomfortable, picturesque and dirty old Syria is regarded as 
holy ground by civilized people. Encouragement of extensive 
pilgrimages to the land of lepers, liars, thieves, superstitions and 
unwashed, may do away with some of this time-honored rev- 
erence. By survival we have the absurdity of ancient hatred as 
between Celt and Saxon continued even after the Celt has be- 
come in many cases Saxon and the Saxon being Celt, exchang- 
ing their racial hatreds also under the mistake of the Saxon 
often being Celtic and the Celt being Saxon. Touching the hat 
is a survival of the former custom of lifting the hat. The wed- 
ding ring is a relic of purchase, and bracelets survive from the 
manacles of female slaves. Louis Napoleon succeeded because 
other national parties in .1849 were quarreling, and they adopted 
him as a compromise, because they thought he would prove im- 
becile or a mannikin, and from the hatred of the legitimists, Or- 
leanists, Bonapartists and Socialists grew up the MacMahon 
control. Seton-Thompson remarks that every animal has some 
great strength or it could not live, and some great weakness or 



EVOLUTION. I25 

the others could not live. The squirrel's weakness is foolish curi- 
osity, the fox's that he cannot climb a tree, and the foxes made 
Up for their weakness by defter play. The fox's axioms are; 
Never sleep on your straight track. Never take the open if you 
can take the cover. Never take a straight trail if a crooked one 
will do. If anything is strange it is hostile, and human babies 
are frightened by strange things, so they have likely inherited this 
trait from very distant animal ancestry. Little foxes instinctively 
fear the scent of man without knowing why. Dogs when water- 
baffled run up and down both banks to regain the scent. Reason 
mingles with instinct in such instances. Animals have been 
known to commit suicide when captured and to destroy their off- 
spring when they cannot release them from the trap. 

While man often influences the disappearance of a species he is 
as frequently unable to diminish its numbers, as in the case of 
twelve million rabbit skins being yearly imported from New 
Zealand, and Australian canneries of rabbits are increasing and 
so are the rabbits. In Argentina the rodent coypu was killed for 
its fur and became so scarce the government stopped its slaughter 
and it increased rapidly till a mysterious disease made it nearly 
extinct again. 

Some races of men have remained apparently unchanged for 
ages, preserving their original savagery, their crude arts and im- 
perfect implements, their tribal customs and superstitions from 
periods probably hundreds of thousands of years back. The 
Turcomans and other Asiatics of Turkestan and especially the 
Kafristans are thus primitive. They are free but not united be- 
yond a few families, they have no recognized leaders but occa- 
sionally defer to some one of influence. And it seems anomalous 
that free-born Americans should ever covet or glorify the condi- 
tions of far off India, but the Theosophists and Occultists and 
similar ignorant and foolish fanatics have been imposed upon by 
the lies of their teachers. Hear what an educated Hindoo said 
of the things that survive today in his country : 

Swami Yivekananda, after a trip to America and Europe, 
returned to India and told his people some unpleasant truths in 
"The Indian Mirror." He told how the old Vedic religion had been 
defiled by the low races that accepted Buddhism until it became 



126 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

"one degraded mass of superstition" with the most hideous cere- 
monials, the most horrible, the most obscene books that human 
hands ever wrote, the most bestial forms that ever passed under 
the name of religion. He told them that they were physically 
and mentally weak, lazy, selfish, no three combining without 
hatred, jealous of one another, hopelessly disorganized mobs 
lighting one another for centuries whether a certain mark is to 
be placed this way or that, writing volumes upon volumes on 
such questions as whether the look of a man spoils my food or 
not. 

The "Independent" then says, "And here in this country are 
mannish women and womanish men looking to India for light 
where this man who knows India from Hardwar to Cape Cam- 
orin sees only in his own capitals "the most rotten superstition in 
the world." 

Millions of instances of such survivals could be cited in our 
apparel, our customs, manners, etc. Earrings are survivals from 
savagery, and the waning of this kind of decoration promises 
that' radical changes will evolve in the dress of both sexes. A 
century ago the male was as gorgeous with gewgaws, lace, silks 
and ribbons as a modern ball-room belle, and, as there is a reason 
for everything, as before mentioned, the cause of the growing 
modesty of man in this respect is that the gentleman found him- 
self outdone in display by every vulgar fellow who could com- 
mand a fortune. His footman aped him and in sheer disgust a 
more modest appearance was adopted and has now become dis- 
tinctive of the gentleman, while ancient costumes and gaudiness 
are relegated to the lackey. Within the recollection of most old 
folks now living the sleek doeskins and broadcloth of our grand- 
fathers and fathers have been discarded because butlers and 
waiters wore them. The ladies can be heard resentfully calling 
attention to the peacock silks and expensive sealskins of the cooks 
and housemaids. We merely copy the workings of all nature in 
these particulars ; learning by experience that richness of cos- 
tume is no evidence for or against the worthiness of its wearer. 
As the world grow r s older it grows wiser and individuals will 
come to be appreciated for what they are, not for what they pos- 
sess, and this is one species of social evolution. 



EVOLUTION. 127 

There are survivals in ceremonies, Fashions, habits, dress, or- 
naments, opinions, notions of marriage, property, and law. The 
best man in a marriage ceremony today survives from a time 
when the bride was captured by the groom and his friends. 
Criminal law grew out of private vengeance, only the state is now 
the avenger. The public prosecutor stands in the place of the 
avenger and often he has the ancient grudge against the prisoner, 
right or wrong. Some people keep up the savage disfigurement 
of tatooing. Civilization tends to suppress ornament altogether. 
As Tyler says, the unconscious evolution of society is giving place 
to its conscious development. 

You may have wondered why "off and nigh horses" are on 
the wrong sides as you sit in your seat to drive them, but when 
you realize that the terms are survivals from old postilion davs 
when the ridden wheel horse was on the left side and was there- 
fore the nigh horse, and the right hand horse was hence the off 
horse, you understand that your right hand seat in the wagon has 
not changed the old names, in spite of their inappropriateness 
now. 



CHAPTER VI. 
HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. 

From many Alpine peaks stream out, thousands of feet in 
length, what are known as cloud-banners. They seem to be per- 
fectly steady, even though a strong wind may be blowing over 
the mountain tops. 

''Why is the cloud not blown away?" asks Tyndall. "It is 
blown away," he answers; "its permanence is only apparent. At 
one end it is incessantly dissolved, at the other end it is inces- 
santly renewed; supply and consumption being thus equalized, 
the cloud appears as changeless as the mountain to which it seems 
to cling. When the red sun of the evening shines upon these 
cloud-streams, they resemble vast torches with their flames blown 
through the air." 

But the cloud is still there, new vapor is condensed, whitened, 
and swept onward, as the social swarms persist even after the 
death of members, and as they existed before such members were 
born. It is the aggregation of atoms in certain ways that make 
the molecule; and the peculiar combinations of molecules in 
other shapes that make inorganic substances. All that exists, 
living or inert, depends for what it can do upon what it is made 
of, and how it is put together. Function is not possible without 
structure ; the plough cannot do the work of the locomotive, even 
though placed upon the track. Given the structure and the envi- 
ronment, which is structure again, and function will take care of 
itself. 

The drops that form the cloud-banner, as well as other meteor- 
ological appearances, pass on, and new drops come, but the orig- 
inal form is there so long as the environment, the influences, are 
unchanged that called the form into being. We die, but our places 
are filled by others, who act as we did, think as we did, because 
thev resemble us, and the closer the resemblance the greater is the 
probability of identical action. Twins often think alike, act the 

128 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. 129 

same, and are subject to the same ailments, particularly if sub- 
jected to the same conditions. It is but a superficial objection that 
this is not true in all instances, for where the rule apparently fails 
it is because there are unknown failures in resemblance, internal 
perhaps, but none the less potent in causing like forms to have 
like functions, unlike to have diverse workings. 

The mere matter of descent does not necessarily involve in- 
heritance of feature or disposition of the immediately preceding 
generation ; reversion sometimes takes place to remote and un- 
known ancestry likeness, but wherever resemblance extends to 
minute details of brain, heart, blood-vessel, and other structure, 
the two who are thus made alike will act alike, and that they do 
so is a matter of common knowledge. 

And so it is in all things concrete and abstract : "Like causes 
produce like effects." 

E. C. Hegeler, of La Salle, Illinois, wrote an excellent essay on 
the subject of form constituting individuality, and his explana- 
tion deserves a far wider circulation than it obtained through the 
"Open Court" publication. 

When we consider the billions of molecules estimated by 
Sorby, of the Royal Microscopic Society, in a single drop of albu- 
men, and the later estimation of between 5,000 and 6,000 atoms in 
a single molecule of this substance, it does not take very much 
imagination to see how the foundation of any sort of animal shape 
up to man himself with all his features, emotions and intellect, 
may not only be transmitted but differ in species and varieties by 
the various groupings of the atoms made possible through the im- 
mense number in a single molecule, and the vast number of such 
molecules in the seed or germ of the plant or animal, regardless 
of the size of the organism, for even the invisible could have mil- 
lions of molecules. 

Goethe 1 says in a little poem beginning "Vom Vater nab' ich 
die Statur" : 

"Stature from father and the mood, 
Stern views of life compelling; 
From mother I take the joyous heart 
And the love of story telling. 
1 Bayard Taylor's Translation Zahme Zenien, VI. 



I3O THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

"Great grandsire's passion was the fair, 
What if I still reveal it ; 
Great-grand-dam's pomp and gold and show, 
And in my bones I feel it. 

"Of all the various elements 
That make up this complexity 
What is there left when all is done 
To call originality ?" 

Some such boast may be heard that "I can trace my ancestry 
to my great-great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather. He 
was a cavalier and fought under Charles I," and, says Duncan 
Rose, "What does that amount to? That was the eighth genera- 
tion before you and in that generation you had 128 forefathers 
and 128 foremothers, 127 of whom you do not know and some of 
them may have been hung for murder or sheep stealing." 
Princes, dukes, etc., came from commoners and their grandchil- 
dren became commoners. William of Normandy from whom so 
many like to claim descent, was a bastard. Cousins of the fifth 
degree alone exceed 2,000. Ancestry, unless kin intermarry, con- 
tain 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 foreparents in the 4th genera- 
tion, and so on, increasing in geometrical progression whose ratio 
is 2. The number of progenitors in the 10th generation is 1,024 
traced to Elizabeth's time, and in the 20th in the day of Edward I 
1,048,576, and going as far back as the Norman conquest 25 gen- 
erations ago each person would today have had 33,000,000 and 
over of ancestry, so there must have been intermarriages to have 
lessened this number. 2 O. W. Holmes 3 attacks the fallacy of the 
descent in general, as popularly regarded, and the claim that hun- 
dreds of criminals have come down from Margaret Jukes, when 
considering the people among whom her immediate descendants 
associated, were of her kind, it merely amounts to communities 
being produced similar to their ancestors. Nor is it always the 
case that offspring resemble their parents, for they may revert to 
their remoter forebears in person or disposition. The sons of 
Charles Martel divided his kingdom, but one resigned to become 

2 Duncan Rose, Pride of Birth. 

3 Elsie Veirner. 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. I 3 I 

a monk and another was deposed and the third was able to hold 
on to his throne only through the pope's friendship. Charle- 
magne's successors did not have his genius or energy. Five in 
seventy-five years bore the imperial title in decaying rule. In 
Germany the family became extinct, in France they were ousted 
by the Capets. The Western Empire decayed and fell to petty 
Italian princes through grabbing squabbles of small politicians. 
Often the hero leaves progeny who inherit none of his traits. 
Oliver Cromwell's son was timid and gladly escaped the cares of 
government. He was the very reverse of his father in disposi- 
tion. William Franklin, the son of Benjamin, was an obstinate 
royalist governor of New Jersey. He was arrested by Congress, 
released on parole and sailed to England. Oscar of Sweden was 
broad, democratic, philanthropic and unselfish. His son is royal 
and narrow-minded. So if people wish to be well ruled they ha.d 
better not depend on good kings having good sons to govern 
them. Many an immense organization, good and bad, with a 
person of striking individuality at its head, has gone to pieces 
when it fell to the descendants to perpetuate it. 

Racial peculiarities can be perpetuated by intermarriage and 
clannishness. Traits possessed in common by relatives become 
intensified by interbreeding and may even arise to national dis- 
tinctiveness. The more a single purpose is developed to the pre- 
judice of other functions the more difficult it will become to adjust 
to new purposes, and this adaptability in certain directions and 
failure to adapt to other directions will be transmitted if the in- 
fluences have existed through many generations. Jews are poor 
farmers, sailors and soldiers, but excellent merchants, and to this 
may be attributed their scattering throughout the world and their 
abandoning Palestine. 

It is a matter of common observation that Hebrews, as a rule, 
are more than ordinarily devoted to their families, and their home 
life is beautiful in many ways. As everything has a cause, the 
most plausible one in this regard appears to me to be the severe 
persecutions to which that race has been subjected for centuries, 
compelling clannishness and affording them their greatest happi- 
ness at home. Persistent influences acting through numberless 



I32 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

generations would surely institute a racial peculiarity such as 
this. 

Darwin 4 ascribes great weight to the inherited effects of use 
and disuse for both body and mind and to the prolonged action 
of changed conditions of life, but he allows for occasional rever- 
sions of structure. 

The correlations of growth whereby parts of the body will van- 
in sympathy though not apparently directly connected are merely 
instances of association of organs though the relations may not 
be understood at the time when noted. 

Haeckel's law of heterochronism in an organ or function ap- 
pearing before its time, out of the order of its inheritance, is il- 
lustrated in little girls nursing dolls because the maternal instinct 
appears ahead of the possibility of its exercise. But imitation 
of elders has greatly to do with this play at caring for babies. 
The vicissitudes of inheritance may be illustrated by a savage 
having married a civilized female, through which union there 
were two girls, one with savage and the other with a milder dis- 
position, but on developing later these two exchanged resem- 
blances to their parents. Another generation by persistence of 
civilized influence lost much of the savage, but there would be 
lapses of individual descendants occasionally to the savage fore- 
father resemblance. Handwriting may be inherited. Tempo- 
rary impressions of the parents, such as mental states, occurring 
for a short while, could have very little weight in determining 
structure as opposed to the influence of long ages of ancestral 
structure breeding. So character is often the result of many cen- 
turies rather than of accidental paternal influence, so far as the 
race is concerned, especially. The occasional feminine antipathy 
to cats is probably inherited from arboreal ancestors who had to 
fight wild cats, and hatred of snakes is doubtless inherited though 
often imparted. 

There may be an accumulation of anomalies in a certain def- 
inite direction by heredity, so that a typical structure may become 
an anomaly and an anomaly become typical, as a dialect may be- 
come a language and a language drop to a dialect. Man may 

4 Preface Second Edition Descent of Man. 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. 133 

spread from tribes to races and the latter drop to tribes. Osborn 5 
shows the relations between development, balance and degenera- 
tion. The thirteenth rib recurs by what Gegenbaur" calls "neo- 
genetic reversion," for it is simply the anomalous adult develop- 
ment of an embryonic rudiment.. Galton says: ''Although it is 
pretty well ascertained that in the masses of population the brain 
ceases to grow after the age of nineteen or even earlier, it is by 
no means the case with university students." The classification 
of heredity, especially with regard to insanity, but equally applica- 
ble to character and other peculiarities, includes the immediate, 
where the inheritance is from the parents ; mediate, when from 
grandparents ; simple when either paternal or maternal, the lat- 
ter being the most important and *three times more common ; 
cumulative when from several generations ; double when through 
both parents ; direct when in the line of descent ; collateral when 
in a side family branch ; homochronous when peculiarities are at 
the same age in the ancestor and descendant ; anticipatory if 
earlier in the latter person ; similar or homologous if the resem- 
blance is close ; dissimilar or transformed if unlike ; progressive in 
intensification of peculiarities through intermarriage ; regressive 
if the peculiarity is diluted ; reversionary if further back than a 
grandparent ; latent if a generation or more is skipped by a pecu- 
liarity. We inherit from our sound ancestry as well as from the 
unsound ; were this otherwise the entire race would be unsound. 
Specialized animals have a more commonly generalized an- 
cestor, suggesting the evolution of the diverse from the uniform, 
varieties from a common progenitor, or, as Spencer would say, 
the heterogeneous from the homogeneous. General abilities, gen- 
eralized emotions and intellect may be inherited, such as deter- 
mination, or force of character, sympathy, musical inclinations ; 
but the particulars are not inherited, they are merely more readily 
developed owing to the predisposition for them. So capacity is 
transmitted but the education is not, that must be acquired, but the 
capacity peculiar to families make education all the easier for 
their children. Galton 7 refers to Darwin's mention under hered- 

5 American Naturalist, June, 1892, p. 455. 
8 Morph. Jahrb. Bd. VI., p. 585. 
7 Hereditary Genius. 



134 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ity, 8 that mental qualities, special tastes, habits, general intelli- 
gence, courage, good and bad temper, are certainly transmitted, 
and genius also. Much inconsistency might be seen by a super- 
ficial examination of such claims that only general abilities are 
handed down, and yet special abilities also appear, but a homely 
comparison may suffice that brain and brawn may make a good 
blacksmith, and his offspring will be adapted to blacksmithing 
very likely ; they did not inherit the trade, but the suitability for 
the trade. If, however, with but little interruption, a hundred 
thousand generations of blacksmiths occurred in a direct family 
line blacksmithing would develop as a general ability instead of a 
special. 

Early marriages were frequent in Hungary and the Magyars 
married their sisters, so the stupidity of the descendants of those 
who did so is readily accounted for by the immature stages of 
fecundation and too close inbreeding. It is conceivable that close 
inbreeding would affect a higher organism, such as higher apes 
and man, or a refined breed of horses or dogs, more than it would 
animals less high in the scale, because the later acquired facul- 
ties, the tenure of which is so uncertain, are likely to be obliterated 
and reversion to occur to the ancestral stock, because the elements 
derivable from changes of stock, within certain limits, are cut 
off by inbreeding, and faults are intensified as well as common 
peculiarities. Early marriages also deprive the developing em- 
bryo of chemical constituents, such as molecular possibilities con- 
fined to more mature periods. Under French control the Egyp- 
tians were not prolific because the same old natural disadvantages 
continued, but when the British regulated the Nile flow so that 
great regions of country became fertile, the fellaheen sprang up 
like rank weeds, and were able to get more wives, food and cigar- 
ettes, and so far as numbers are concerned the Egyptian is in- 
creasing, as did the Hindoos under the same government. 

If half the race is degraded the entire race will suffer. If 
women are repressed, as heretofore, and as low oriental conditions 
allow, and kept uneducated and from opportunities to advance, 
then the children of both sexes will suffer from inheritance and 
faulty training of the mothers whose care is the most important 

8 Plants and Animals Under Domestication. 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. 1 35 

for the young. The color of hair, eyes and complexion in the 
order named can indicate race origin better than other things. 
Language is of the least importance. To tabulate ancestral in- 
heritance it would be well to record in children when the hair 
and eyes changed color, and the weight of heredity, not the se- 
quence always, might then be found, but it would seem justified 
to infer that children with yellow hair, blue eyes and fair com- 
plexion show Aryan as their first or remotest peculiarities. 
Darker hair and eyes and other colors and the darker complex- 
ions, it is likely, came from other races than the Aryan. The 
significance of so many children of Germanic and Celtic races 
being blue eyed and yellow haired could be that the Aryans were 
their far off ancestry. Subsequent complexions point to crossings 
with other races. Intense blondism may savor of yellow dog re- 
version to the jackal in a few cases. Not much attention has been 
paid to progenitors and descent, but with modern ninety-nine year 
leases increasing there will be inducements for descent to be more 
carefully recorded, and interest will change the former careless- 
ness of preserving family trees. 

Darwin records that the plumage of the young is not as a 
rule so conspicuous as that of the parents. Variations arising 
later in life are commonly transmitted to the same sex. Mental 
inheritance is often associated with the appearance, for a child 
may inherit features from a parent and also resemble that parent 
in disposition. We do what our anatomical make-up compels us 
to do, a certain brain shape entails a certain character. It is con- 
ceivable that if the tissues of either parent were adjusted to alco- 
hol that the germ and sperm cells would be so modified that at 
the time of the first drink the adjustment would be found to have 
been made in the offspring, and the taste was thus arranged for 
ante-natally. This defect or want with a physical molecular basis 
may be carried to the extreme of producing idiocy or feeble mind- 
edness. Two totally distinct families of frogs took to an arboreal 
life and became so like one another that we have to depend on 
anatomical differences to tell them apart. This shows how like 
environment may produce like effects and modify differing spe- 
cies. Goethe indicated the existence of an underlying law or plan 

"Descent of Man, Vol. II., p. 179. 



136 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

in pointing out that all forms are similar though they differ one 
from the other. 

Democritus expressed the idea of pan-genesis in suggesting 
that the seed of animals was derived from all parts of the bodies 
of both sexes and that like parts produced like, and Buffon re- 
vived this idea of heredity two thousand years later. Spencer 
suggested "physiological units" from the body-cells of the parent 
forming the germ cells and then developing into the body cells 
of the offspring. Darwin postulated a circulation of minute buds 
from each cell, each body-cell throwing off a gemmule containing 
its characteristics, which concentrate in the germ cell. Galton 
contributed experimental disproof of the blood circulating gem- 
mules, and Prof. Brooks 10 regarded the ovum as a cell designed 
to be a storehouse of hereditary characteristics, each characteristic 
being represented by material particles of some kind ; thus hered- 
itary characteristics were handed down by simple cell division, 
each fertilized ovum giving rise to the body cells in which its 
hereditary characters were manifested and to new ova in which 
these characters were conserved for the next generation. Weis- 
mann disregards many facts to confuse himself and others with 
words and refines and elaborates the continuity of germ cells, a 
notion which is "as old as the hills." As the successor of meta- 
physical ways of thinking the biolc gical can only supplant it by a 
thorough chemical knowledge which biologists in general appear 
to prefer to get along without. A proper regard for such very 
actual entities as atomic and molecular combinations in the build- 
ing up of both the germ and sperm cells, will make clear many 
otherwise mysterious phenomena. 

The lowest organism contains in its combined germ and 
sperm cell given off by fission, a mere continuation of its own 
substance, so that the continuation theory is true for these prim- 
itive forms. In the evolutionary scale the higher animal is a 
more complex organism, made up of molecular combinations 
grouped together in mechanical and chemical complexities, in an 
orderly, evolved manner, step by step. When one step in mole- 
cular growth and union of molecules had been taken, another 
step was possible, and it is this sort of potential, this latent pos- 
10 Law of Heredity, 1883. 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. 137 

sibility, that is transmitted with the ovum given off, that con- 
stitutes all there is in heredity. 

For instance, the simplest descent is by the parent parting with 
a piece of itself. The next step is when cells take upon themselves 
the function of elaborating the molecules of the parent that are 
to produce the offspring, and next differentiation of the germ and 
sperm cells occur, the germ cell to afford the main mass of pa- 
rental pabulum, or basic molecules, and the sperm cell is left more 
free to elaborate the higher grouping of atoms and molecules and 
their tensions or tendency to attract further atoms in regular se- 
quence, so that when the sperm and the germ cells are united the 
fecundated ovum is started on a career of molecular tensions and 
attractions, or affinities for substances to be picked out of its en- 
vironment, the maternal tissues of all kinds, not blood alone, in 
the order of possibility of building up, imparted and copied from 
the history of the race, the tribe, the family, the species. 

If the atoms a, b, c, d, e, f constitute the highest form of mo- 
lecular construction of potential protoplasm and a and b the low- 
est, then c, d, e, f are acquired evolutionarily. If the atoms are 
not in the environment and not found in the order acquired ; if 
one, say d, is absent, then a break occurs even though others are 
present. If all are present then all may be taken up in sequence. 

So, if, to simplify matters, salt is a necessity to the evolving 
tissues and organisms, both the ancestral form and embryo will 
have affinities for salt that will ensure its presence in nutritive 
fluids such as blood, lymph and amniotic fluid, so the organism 
may be said to carry its environment, in this case a salty fluid, 
with it in gestation ; and so if the chemical constituents which are 
main factors in the evolution of the organism are present also 
with the embryo, then ontogenesis is chemically identical with 
phylogenesis, individual with race history. 

Cope's law of acceleration lops off or abbreviates stages. So 
salmon seek fresh water and eels salt water to spawn, caused 
probably by the salmon's ancestry being, for an important period, 
fresh water fish and eels originally having come from the sea. 

The heat needed to build the egg into a chick apparently 
moves the molecules about and enables chemical interchange. 
Plant evolution and development from seed similarly consists in an 



1 38 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

aggregation of atoms set in motion by heat and moisture to afford 
the necessary rotation and combination. 

How diseases are inherited was discussed in Science Progress, 
August, 1896, and reference was made to Pasteur's pebrine dis- 
ease of silkworms in which definite sporocysts were transmitted 
from the imago, or perfect insect, by way of the egg cell and that 
the larva was directly infected in this manner. It has often 
seemed to me that indirect transmission is more common through 
the inheritance of a predisposition, which simply means that the 
soil is the same in the ancestor and the offspring, upon which the 
same kind of germs find lodgment and are thus enabled to thrive. 

The reasons for reversions through crossing, such as the 
wilder offspring of a negro and Indian mixture, appears to me 
to be through acquired traits when recent and weak depending 
upon freshly created microscopic brain and nerve development 
which being alike in the sexes of the European are transmitted to 
the children, but being unlike or missing in other races, such in- 
side features are not handed down by inheritance. 

When two races who are both low in the scale cross the result 
is eminently bad. Half castes are said to be "made by the devil." 
When mules are wild they have striped legs like their ancestry. 

As the right of private vengeance is a recognized one among 
Asiatic tribes and similarly crude customs render such people in- 
compatible with civilized society, whenever one of the civilized 
marries into such an ancient community his offspring is liable 
to revert to the lower stock because it was common to all our 
races, as mongrel dogs go back to the yellow jackal. 

The students of the Latin Quarter annually celebrate their 
mid-lent carnival, and elect a queen from the Parisian washer- 
women. The students' motto is "Folie et Charite." A collection 
of the photographs of these queens, each is called "Reine des 
Retries," compares favorably with portraits of veritable queens. 
Owing to the selection of the better looking these washerwomen 
look better in their regal clothing than an equal number of female 
members of reigning families. 

Megalomania, or big head, could naturally be the form of in- 
sanity of unbridled sovereigns even to the subversion of regard 
for parents, as little Wilhelmina of Holland exhibited when she 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. I39 

compelled her mother to pick up her dropped boquet and Wilhelm 
of Germany parades in his dislike for his mother. Wilhelm has 
made public claims to divine inspiration and asserts he has mas- 
tered all the arts and resents criticism of his productions. In the 
Baltic he sermonized on his yacht in churchly robes and likes 
stage effects as Nero did with similar claims to omniscience. An 
Arab swindled him by selling him some costly "Moorish steeds'" 
that turned out to be common horses, and he went into a maniacal 
fury that came near ending in the stable men tying him up with 
vulgar stable ropes. His delusions of persecution after being 
struck by a lunatic were quite well known. He prepared his army 
to kill off all in Berlin if necessary to protect him. Nicholas of 
Russia is a mystic and tends to melancholy brooding, at one time 
falling into the clutches of a French humbug clairvoyant. He is 
surprisingly superstitious in spite of his wide reading and oppor- 
tunities for information, certainly a reversionary trait to worse 
times. Alfonso of Spain also treated his mother shabbily and 
gave his ministers and bishops trouble by his loftiness and sneer* 
at "holy" matters such as relics. A wiser king, from policy, 
would not have publicly scoffed even though he did not assent to 
priestly tricks, though more can be dared than formerly, for in- 
telligence is beginning to spread even in Spain. 

The madness of Otto of Bavaria ended in his killing the cele- 
brated Dr. Gudden, a more useful man than Otto could ever have 
become, and committing suicide at the same time. He came from 
insane stock. The Hapsburgs and Bourbons have face and other 
peculiarities due to heredity and the Jews are thus similar through 
intermarriage. 11 Joanna of Aragon was weak-minded, jealous, 
and before becoming ungovernably mad in 1496, married Philip 
whom she poisoned. Her sister Catherine was the mother of 
Bloody Mary of England who showed the moral insanity and 
ferocious bigotry of the other Spanish Hapsburgs. A grand- 
daughter of Joanna's went mad and her son was demented. A 
Portuguese queen descendent of a sister of Joanna went raving 
mad. Numerous children of Ferdinand and Isabella were sickly 
and died young. Joanna's son, Emperor Charles V of Germany 
was sound mentally till later in life when he became melancholic. 

" Races of Man, 1876, Oscar Pascal. 



I40 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Philip II, his successor, was one of the most gloomy and ferocious 
bigots the world ever saw. He was content with nothing but 
wholesale murder and extermination. Don Carlos, his eldest son, 
was furious and ungovernably vicious and finally died insane. 
Rudolf II, of 1576 to 1612, son of Maximilian II, had uncontrol- 
lable passion followed by abject submission to his advisors, the 
Jesuits. Rudolf II, Don Carlos and Ferdinand II had equally 
odious characters with Philip II. To the ferocious bigotry of 
Ferdinand II may be ascribed the thirty years' war, one of the 
most hideous wars of history. More than twelve million people 
perished in strife, wolves tore through the burnt and deserted vil- 
lages ; men killed their children and dug up dead bodies for food, 
and before its close Germany was exhausted. Ferdinand was 
treacherous, cold-blooded and diabolical, and a tool of the Jesuits. 
Peter the Great was furious, cruel and savage, sometimes spend- 
ing an entire day as executioner, cutting off his subjects' heads. 
He was epileptic like Mohammed, Napoleon and Swedenbourg, 
and flogged his own son Alexis to death. Peter II, the grandson 
of Peter the Great, repeated every vice of his grandsire and was 
assassinated by order of his wife, Catherine II. Paul I was also 
done away with for being as bad as Peter. Alexander I escaped 
the insanity but the ignorant frustrated his plans to do good. 

George III is said to have had the same form of insanity as 
his ancestor, the Duke of Cella, in the sixteenth century, 200 
years later. 

Th. Ribot 12 remarks that talent, power, wealth are ephemeral, 
for degeneracy, which is always fatally inherent in that which 
rises, will again lower them or their race, while the silent work of 
the millions will continue to produce others and to impress upon 
them a distinctive character. 

W. W. Ireland, 13 in his admirable writings, reviews the matter 
of the insanity of the Claudian-Julian family, Augustus, Julia, 
Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Messalina, Agrippina, Nero, Dom- 
itian. The Empress Charlotte of the French-Austrian attempt to 
grab Mexico, sister of the Belgian King Leopold II lost her rea- 
son in 1867 upon the death of her husband Maximilian who was 

12 Diseases of Personality. 

13 The Blot Upon the Brain. 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. 141 

captured and shot by the Mexicans. The list of crazy royalty 
could be indefinitely extended. Ireland speaks of the insanity of 
power. Certainly where mankind has become better suited to 
be governed than to have unlimited power an unstable brain could 
readily break down when all checks upon folly, cruelty or ex- 
travagance were removed. But when bad heredity is intensified 
by intermarriages despotism and degeneracy are at their worst, 
and what can be said of people who allow such monsters to rule 
them ? 

Wallace notes 14 that health, strength and long life are the re- 
sults of a harmony between the individual and the universe. 

The correlation of growth causes hairless dogs to have im- 
perfect health, while cats when blue-eyed are deaf. Small feet 
accompany short beaks in pigeons. The most basic instincts are 
capable of inhibition through training, as in the case of a man 
dropping dead from starvation through unwillingness to accept 
charity. Of course insanity accounts for numberless perversions 
of that and other kinds. It is degeneracy indeed when the mater- 
nal instinct fails as when the yak in Lincoln Park, Chicago, kicked 
its infant away and it became necessary to feed it on cow's milk. 

Poor William Cowper the poet, Mary Lamb and her brother 
Charles Lamb, belonged to the host of imperfect human beings 
classified as degenerates. Byron was both mentally and physi- 
cally defective, but it need not be inferred that all who achieve 
anything in this world are degenerates, nor that mediocrity is 
proof against mental disorder. As to degeneracy of institutions 
many that were started to benefit mankind have attracted the 
sneaks who perverted the funds to their own private use or sub- 
stituted a completely different, often antagonistic, end for the 
original intent of the organization. 

The sea squirts were free swimmers when young but became 
attached as adults. Oysters are degenerate molluscs whose an- 
cestors were free swimmers. The flat fish with migratory eyes 
that transfer from opposite sides to the upper part of the fish, are 
degenerate, as are the blind cave fish who show evidences of their 
ancestral optic apparatus. Any new set of conditions occurring 

Natural Selection. 



I42 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

to an animal which renders its food and safety very easily attained 
leads as a rule to degeneration, just as an active, healthy man 
sometimes degenerates when he becomes possessed of a fortune, 
or as Rome did when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. 

Let the parasitic life be once secured and away go legs, jaws, 
eyes and ears, the active, highly gifted crab, insect or annelid 
may become a mere sac, absorbing nourishment and laying eggs. 

Languages degenerate, high civilization has decayed. By 
studying the conditions likely to set up degeneration we may 
avoid that fate for our race. 

Seton Thompson says that the mongrel yellow dog is an at- 
tempt of nature to restore the ancestral jackal, the parent stock of 
all dogs. The scientific name of the jackal is Canis aureus, which 
means yellow dog, and not a few of that animal's characteristics 
are seen in his domesticated representative, for the plebeian cur 
is shrewd, active and hardy and far better equipped for the real 
struggle of life than are any of his thoroughbred kinsmen. The 
reversion sometimes is more complete and the yellow dog appears 
with pricked and pointed ears and is liable to develop the dead- 
liest treachery. Seton Thompson tells of a mongrel collie 15 raised 
as a sheep dog who, faithful at first, afterwards became a savage, 
treacherous sheep killer. Another yellow dog led a double life as 
a faithful sheep dog by day but was a bloodthirsty devourer of 
far-off neighbors' flocks by night, too smart to attack his own 
master's sheep. Such instances are more common than are sup- 
posed. Seton Thompson secured accounts of six collies of this 
kind, one of whom added to his nightly amusement the crowning 
barbarity of murdering the smaller dogs of the vicinity. He had 
killed twenty and hidden them in the sand pit. 

Where the outside of the heels of shoes are worn, due to weak 
ankles or where there are bow legs, there is a resemblance in the 
gait to the waddle of the climbing apes, and as they preceded 
man and his present method of walking the waddle and bow legs 
are reversions to our tree-climbing forefathers, except where 
rickets is the cause, then the degeneracy is even worse. The 
ability to grasp with the foot and toes is monkey-like and atavistic 
or reversionary. There are instances of arrested development, 

15 Wild Animals I Have Known. 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. I43 

post-natal as well as pre-natal rather loosely included as degene- 
rates. 

Reversionary sense of smell in some defectives suggests the 
query, Are savages better developed in olfaction? A reversionary 
in St. Louis told his friends by their personal odor, and some im- 
perfectly developed children have this peculiar ability which 
should be discouraged whenever found. There are racial tenden- 
cies to retrogression. History is full of examples of nations after 
gaining certain degrees of civilization, losing it more rapidly than 
it had been acquired. Arts and laws were forgotten and their 
descendants in Asia, Egypt and Central America wander through 
the ruined halls of their ancestral palaces without a glimmer of 
tradition of their past greatness. Many Spanish and Portuguese 
in America sink to the lowest levels. 

Hysteria is a form of degeneracy. Xo matter what necessity 
others may be under to get a living or to hasten to work the hys- 
terical demands services as imperiously as though her selfish 
whims were the most important things in the world and every one 
else had business of no consequence. It is dissolution or rever- 
sion or arrest to childishness so far as disposition goes. The men- 
tal reversion to ape-like inanity, and imitation, or to harmless 
uselessness is observable in many young club members. "Sissies," 
as they are called, who spend their time at trivial games and sip- 
ping drinks at club bars and addressing each other as "Deah boy,'' 
repeating idiotically certain phrases, never reading, and com- 
plaining that thinking gives them headaches. The cigarette is 
operating somewhat to kill off this degeneracy. Senility exhibits 
various phases of mental dissolution ; an old lady of good literary 
attainments became lachrymose, fearful of death with no philo- 
sophical resignation and yet not religious. If in pleasant com- 
pany she could appear like her former self. A literary training 
does not impart the resignation that science is so apt to afford to 
declining years. 

Dissolution is a sort of analysis, enabling traits to stand alone, 
or in new relations, uncombined with others that may have con- 
cealed them. 

In de Croisset's play "J e ne sais quoi" is shown the evolution 
or involution of an honest, loud, raw American girl, with bad 



144 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

French accent, into a dishonest Parisian woman with a pure 
accent. 

Dissolution uncovers bases and fundamentals unsuspected be- 
fore. For instance, in mental disintegration the faculties that 
are capable of distinction, singly or involving certain other facul- 
ties, become apparent. Basic emotions are shown by the insane, 
such as exaltation and depression, delusions of wealth, power, 
persecution, poisoning, etc. When a rich man becomes poor he 
is astounded at the falling away of friends and at what he had 
previously considered fixed. He has merely seen the superstruc- 
ture removed. When famine reaches a land, during shipwreck, 
when war comes, things appear in new guises, and you realize 
that you did not really know your friends before. In captivity, 
in prison, and in other afflictions the brute in man stands nakedly 
forth, and startling developments of some beautiful traits are 
sometimes disclosed that were all unsuspected previously. 

During the World's Fair was the thief's opportunity for ex- 
tortion, robbery, etc. During a crowded conclave once in Chi- 
cago water was sold to sun-stricken visitors by bartenders at fifty 
cents a glass. Nations during dissolution assume primitive char- 
acteristics. Opportunity discloses realities not imagined to exist 
previously. 

Large universities, seminaries, etc., may in their early poverty- 
stricken days send forth their best results in graduates. Later 
when wealthy, fashionable boarding schools cultivating emotions 
instead of reason, athletics forsaking regard for mental training, 
may sap the intelligence of the pupils largely. The early Chris- 
tians were sincere but rogues corrupted the church as it waxed 
rich. Tolstoy wrote feelingly on this subject. Secret societies 
often degenerate and have become nests of criminals, in extreme 
instances inducing governments to destroy the society and its 
members. 

Degeneracy is observable in some business corporations where 
petty swindling, coupled with great extortion succeeds to the 
bribery of officials, with too great profits, such as a vast telephone 
company secures; the next step is a lowered tone of employes, 
their neglect of business and finally matters become so putrid that 
a receivership or competition follows, unless the patient public 



HEREDITY AND DEGENERACY. 



45 



continues to support the monstrosity. Coal conspiracies between 
railroads and dealers have threatened industrial degeneracy. 



CHAPTER VII. 

SUPERSTITION. 

Definitions of superstition are always unsatisfactory, says 
Professor Joseph Jastrow. It masquerades in strange, some- 
times pleasing garb, and it is not always easy to recognize it in 
its disguises. He refers to the historian Lecky having written a 
notable account of the struggle between superstition and reason, 1 
and to the fact that streaks of superstition enter into the composi- 
tion of each one of us, a most important thing to understand is 
that superstition is a natural inborn human trait. We deceive 
ourselves often into imagining that we have reasons for believing 
matters when they may be founded upon delusions, pure and 
simple. We welcome arguments that support a belief to which 
we are already, perhaps unreasonably, disposed. Lowell says : 
"The marvelous is so fascinating that nine out of ten, if once 
persuaded that a thing is possible, are eager to believe it prob- 
able, and at last cunning in convincing themselves that it is 
proven." 

Current appeals to our fears instruct us not to spill salt, not 
to be one of thirteen at table, not to begin anything on Friday, not 
to look at the new moon over your left shoulder ; that bad luck 
follows from meeting a yellow dog or black cat, passing under a 
ladder, opening an umbrella in the house, breaking a mirror ; 
while good luck is secured by planting at certain phases of the 
moon, finding a horseshoe or gathering the froth on your coflee, 
as it represents money. Children solemnly tell each other that 
lessons will be missed if cracks in the pavement are stepped on, 
a sign made over the left shoulder enables a lie to be told without 
the usual consequences, tingling of your left ear means that some 
one is talking against you ; and Jastrow, who has made a study of 
such matters, concludes that : 

1 History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. 

146 



SUPERSTITION. I 47 

"Possibly the surest index of the aliveness of these beliefs is 
that the attitude of childhood is sufficiently sympathetic with them 
to make children invent superstitions, and local variations of these 
or inventions of signs and interpretations of omens may be found 
wherever the spirit of childhood blossoms unrepressed. The 
lives of the less progressive portions of the community are like- 
wise favorable to the persistence of unreasoning beliefs, and 
sailors, nurses and rustics will add a rich addition to the hand- 
ful of irrational notions above cited. All this means that, where 
the rationalistic spirit is absent or undevek>ped, the superstitious 
bent has a freer field, and as a rule improves his opportunities. 
Where these beliefs survive most vigorously there is least exami- 
nation of their truth or plausibility, and there is a most ready 
acceptance of them by their natural appeal to a sympathetic tem- 
perament. These beliefs are cherished mainly — and yet not ex- 
clusively — because the persons who are attracted to them feel 
like believing them. They fit in with the general thought habits 
of the individual, and he believes in response to a temperamental 
impulse, and very, very little by virtue of any proof or experience 
that to him seems to justify the belief." 

Fear and love are the emotions .concerned in what has inter- 
changeably been called by either name of superstition or religion 
according to bias or training, and the reasons why such fierce 
contentions have filled the world over creeds is that these same 
emotions are all powerful in their control of human activities, 
next to hunger, which is the dominant desire, and which fre- 
quently, in some of its derived forms of greed, love of admiration, 
love of power, etc., takes advantage of the superstition or relig- 
ion it finds that it can impose upon and turn to its own selfish use. 

Brinton holds that "the principle at the base of all religions 
and all superstitions is the same, and the grossest rites of bar- 
barism deserve the name of religion just as much as the refined 
ceremonies of modern churches. The aims of the worshipper 
may be selfish and sensuous, there may be entire absence of ethical 
intention, his rites may be empty formalities and his creed im- 
moral, but this will be his religion all the same, and we should not 
apply to it any other name." 2 

'Brinton, Religion of Primitive Peoples, p. 28. 



I48 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

The dog superstitiously howls at the moon or its shadows, 
with ruffled fur and trembling, and horses shy away from wheel- 
barrows from what causes some men to shy into church : fear of 
the unknown. And dogs take advantage of the awe in which 
others may stand by impressing their importance upon them, and 
many sermons, speeches and threats of humanity are to the same 
end as the bark of the dog. 

Heroditus tells of the noise of the donkeys of the army of 
Darius stampeding the Scythian cavalry horses, as they had never 
heard the like, this and the terror of horses for steam road-rollers 
and other unfamiliar things is in the nature of superstition. 
Shrinking from danger, whether done consciously or not is a 
reflex associated with fear, and some exhibitions of superstition 
are due to this instinct. The sensitive plant folds its leaf when 
touched, the wild cactus spreads its stamens, and the polyp con- 
tracts its tentacles. So a reaction like this may be the nearest to 
what would correspond to dread in the lowest forms of life. 

Max Miiller 3 refers approvingly to Rudolph von Jhering's 
book 4 wherein the first Aryan home is located on the northern 
slopes of the Hindukush, where others had placed it before. 
Agriculture on a large scale there was not practicable and the 
mode of life was that of shepherds and breeders of goats, cows, 
sheep and swine, and this nomadic life was kept up on the march 
from their first to their second home in the southern parts of what 
is now called Russia. Gradually agricultural arts arose and that 
of manuring was regarded as so important that the Romans in- 
vented a god, Sterculius, to preside over the process of manuring. 
The plough was a large stick pointed like a hog's snout, drawn 
by men and women. He thinks that overcrowding, famine and 
epidemics drove the ancestors of the Greeks and Italians to 
Thrace, Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, and that the Celts were the 
next to follow, settling across the Rhine, while the Germans 
who came after took the other eastern side of that river. Those 
who remained in the second Aryan home were the Slavs. Some 
of the changes in languages may have been due to contact with 
the original inhabitants conquered by the Aryan speakers. The 

3 Prehistoric Antiquities of the Indo-European, Cosmopolis, Sept., 1896. 

4 Vorgeschichte der Indo-Europaer, 1894. 



SUPERSTITION. 1 49 

regular spring exodus of young people from Arya and later set- 
tlements became a sacred performance, the ver sacrum, there were 
many halting places between the Hindukush and the Caucasus, 
and a long rest in the so-called second home in the southern parts 
of Russia. Professor Jhering discovers in customs which are 
utterly unmeaning and absurd some former object which accounts 
for their origin. The hasta prseusta, or wooden spear, was 
thrown into the enemy's country in declaring war as a survival 
from the time when there were only wooden spears ; priests used 
stone hatchets in their sacrifices long after iron tools were com- 
mon, just as the Jews still use a flint knife in circumcision be- 
cause the original silliness was started in days when there were no 
other kinds of knives. At Rome there was a superstition of the 
kind with reference to the Pons Sublicius, a bridge which was 
under the special care of the Pontifices, and in repairing it no nail 
made of metal was allowed to be used, as when it was first built 
only wooden nails were known. The vestal virgins, "brides of 
heaven," did not use flint against flint to kindle their sacred fire, 
but rubbed wood together instead so their capers are thought to 
date from a period earlier than the stone age. 

Professor Jhering sees in all these customs the tenacity of the 
Romans in preserving whatever was old and venerable, even 
after it had lost its original purpose. He looks for residua of 
customs which admit of an explanation during a period of mi- 
gration, preceding the settlement of the Italian tribes, but which 
in later times are nothing but hollow formalities or superstitions. 
Superstes meaning what remains over Miiller suggests superstitio 
in the sense of survival, or of something kept alive, though its 
original purpose is forgotten, and its real life gone. He traces 
the present name of the priests as bridge builders, pontifices, and 
their duties were occasionally to throw the aged over to the fishes 
to appease the river gods for having put fetters on the stream. 
Later these human victims were replaced by a manikin, make- 
believe man, the argei, made of bulrushes. 

To determine serious questions the priests of old Rome would 
note how and which way birds flew, or inspect the entrails of ani- 
mals, or watch a chicken eat, and such silly methods were gravely 
accepted by the common people as a child plays at "he loves me, 



x 5° 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 



he loves me not." Jhering says there must be a reason in all this 
unreason, and ascribes- the customs to peculiar circumstances of 
the Aryan migrations, that they were all originally for some prac- 
tical purpose. The custom of regarding the sky in a senseless 
wav came down from the need of watching clouds, winds and 
distant storms at midnight, to ascertain whether the next morn- 
ing would be fit for marching or fighting or remaining encamped. 
The fact that leaders observed the clouds was noted by the 
rabble, but as they were unable to understand why this was done 
of course imposters arose to humbug them into paying for all 
sorts of pretended revelations secured in such and similar ways. 
This was the signa de ccelo which the augurs observed. They 
also had the signa pedestria, or observation of the ground, never 
explaining what they saw by examining the road, and in fact 
ignorant themselves that originally the scouts looked over the 
route for foxes that might eat chickens the emigrants took with 
them, also for snakes, wolves, etc. 

To avoid contaminated water, poisonous plants, as grain, 
fruits or berries, fowls were watched as they were fed with such 
suspected articles, and so the appetites and often the intestines 
of animals were inspected to see if what the country produced 
were safe to eat. Cicero (De Div. ii, 13) is referred to in sup- 
port of this explanation. When the original meanings of these 
signs were lost it became profitable to the haruspices to keep up 
the imitation of intestine examining and pretending to learn all 
sorts of things from it to get the pennies of the ignorant. 

Jhering explains the signa ex avibus of the auspices, the 
watching of the flight of birds, as having originated in the lead- 
ers noting such flights to find passes in mountains, as birds would 
fly through them rather than over peaks. 

Miiller thinks the Aryan barbarians would not have been civ- 
ilized had they not come in contact with the Semites, and this 
would account for European civilization coming from the Ro- 
mans in contact with Semites in more ways than linguistically, 
explaining the loss by the Romans of their Aryan blue eyes and 
yellow hair, which the Germanic and Celtic savages retained till 
mixed with their captives from the Mediterranean regions. 



SUPERSTITION. 151 

Max Muller' states that in 1845 tw0 Roman Catholic mis- 
sionaries. Hue and Gabet, were startled by finding in Thibet the 
sameness of the Buddhist and Roman ritual, and among other 
things the coincidences of the crosier, dalmatic, cope, the service 
with two choirs, the psalmody, exorcism, the use of censers held 
by five chains, which shut and open by themselves, blessings 
given by the lamas in extending their right hand over the heads 
of the faithful, the rosaries, the celibacy of priests, spiritual re- 
treats, worship of saints, fastings, processions, litanies, holy 
water, etc. Instead of the Buddhists borrowing these things 
from the Christians it was found that the Buddhists had them 
long before Christ was born. Not only the matters mentioned, 
but such minor affairs as confessions, and so on, are mentioned 
in the Tripitaka, the bible of the Buddhists, and dates from the 
council of 259 B. C, when Asoka was king, as admitted by schol- 
ars without contention. A later date of 88-76 B. C, when the 
Buddhist laws were reduced to writing, answers just as well to 
show the Buddhist origin of the Roman Catholic ceremonies and 
ecclesiastical millinery. 

The fable of the ass in the lion's skin is traced back to the 
Buddhists and other myths to ancient Aryan days. 

Muller thinks that Buddha has been made a saint by, the early 
Christians under the name of St. Josaphat. There are coinci- 
dences of Buddha's miraculous birth, the star over the house 
where he was to be born, the old Asita waiting for his advent, 
and. dying after having prophesied the greatness of Buddha as 
the ruler of an earthly or of a heavenly kingdom, Buddha's temp- 
tation by Mara, the twelve disciples, his special love for one of 
them, Ananda, the many miracles ascribed to him and his out- 
spoken disapproval of miracle-working. The story of the judg- 
ment of Soloman is under a different name in the Buddhist rec- 
ords, with the story ending "go and sin and no more," the story 
of the prodigal son, Buddha's walking on the river, and the feed- 
ing of the multitude on a single cake, with many cakes left over. 
Muller is really biased against accepting the origin of Christian 
ceremonies and teachings from ancient sources, but upholds ad- 

5 Coincidences, Last Essays, p. 251. 



1^2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

mitting whatever shall be proven as the only honest course, re- 
gardless of results. 

The man-like ape, the gibbon of Java, greets the rising and 
setting sun morning and evening with cries of "Hoo-lock or 
whoop-poo," and the natives name the animal from this sound. 
The monkeys with the absurdly long noses, the proboscis mon- 
keys, assemble in large numbers in the mornings and evenings at 
the rising and setting of the sun. This custom with the greet- 
ing of the gibbons could be studied with reference to the Per- 
sian sun worship. Many species of animals and numerous tribes 
of men attach importance to the coming and going of the sun, 
moon and stars in different ways, but all with regard to emo- 
tions aroused by the changes of light and dark. 

The principal god of the Parsees or Persians was the god of 
the sun, and the sun itself became an object of worship among 
them as with so many other early nations. This Mithras of the 
Persians is the Helios of the Greeks and the Apollo which the 
Romans acquired from the Greeks, and sun worship is clearly 
traced through all these names. Manes, the founder of the Mani- 
chaen sect, wished to identify Christ with Mithras. 

Dogs may be observed turning round and round before lying 
down, and at other times scratching backward in a pretense of 
throwing dirt. These motions are ceremonial survivals from 
ancestral jackals who trod down the grass by this turning around 
process, and who covered excreta with earth. It is likely that 
Buddha taught the Hindoos to avoid touching water vessels with 
their mouths to prevent disease conveyance, but the precaution 
lost its original meaning and degenerated into a mere religious 
observance kept up simply because Buddha taught it and for no 
other reason, the caste regulation requiring the water to be poured 
into the mouth from the jar at arm's length. 

Savages have repeatedly been terrified by seeing for the first 
time men on horseback, mistaking them for a single animal, and 
this originated the idea of the centaur, the mythological half- 
horse half-man. In this class of monsters, animals with six 
limbs, hexapod mammal impossibilities, we find angels with bird's 
wings on human backs, and there are no muscular or bony at- 
tachments for wings in human backs or shoulders unless we take 



SUPERSTITION. 153 

the arms away ; there were also animals such as the bull or lion 
with man's head, the sphinx, and any quantity of men with ani- 
mal heads. The Aard Yark or earth pig of Africa with the long 
snout can be the Seth of Egypt, and the Ant Eater of South 
America has a similar snout. The baboon was consecrated by 
ancient Egyptians to the god Thoth. Hermopolis was devoted 
to the worship of these animals and Thebes had a special ceme- 
tery or necropolis for their mummies. The ibis was also sacred 
to the Egyptians. It was domesticated and bred freely, but dis- 
appeared when unprotected. It was the emblem of Thoth, the 
Secretary of Osiris, and w r as embalmed for the temples in great 
numbers. It was known in India as the curlew. The Egyptian 
cat was venerated and embalmed, and its mummies are found in 
tombs. The natives of Madagascar fear the Aye-aye as having 
supernatural pow-er. The secret by which it can be disarmed is 
claimed by a few persons, and this claim has in it a germ of a 
priesthood that can charge for protecting childish minds against 
imaginary evils. The tiger is regarded with superstitious rever- 
ence in Hindustan, and parts of the tiger are used as charms and 
others regard these relics as deadly poisons. Crocodiles were 
worshipped at Thebes, and the long-snouted crocodile was held 
sacred in many parts of India, where animal worship survived 
in temples w T ith ponds where there w r ere special priests for the 
4, muggers" or crocodiles, to whom men, women and children 
were fed as sacrifices. In parts of India wayfarers have a semi- 
religious custom of tearing a strip off their clothes to hang on a 
tree, and it soon becomes loaded with rags and tatters, which 
the vultures use in their nest-making. Left handed spiral shells 
are rare and are sacred to the Hindoos and Buddhist priests of 
Ceylon and China ; the rarity of the cowrie shell makes it useful 
as a money substitute in many countries. The four-leafed clover 
survives with a superstitious value to this day. The Ainos offer 
libations of saki to the head of a bear, and thousands of other 
instances of religious regard for animals could be cited. In South 
America the boa is eaten and its fat is regarded as medicinal, as 
some simple people today think beaver's oil is good for rheuma- 
tism. Skinks are lizards adapted to burrowing in the ground ; 
they are short-tailed, and have the reputation among the Arabs 



154 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

as being an infallible cure for almost all diseases. The flesh is 
used for food and medicine. The reptile gecko is supposed to 
eject venom from its toes and to leave the impress of its body 
on steel, and it is blamed as being the cause of leprosy by the 
ignorant Egyptians. In old England and down to comparatively 
recent days a misconstruction of the word barnacle caused the 
superstition to spread that geese were at times formed by bar- 
nacles, and there are old pictures extant of the goose-barnacle 

tree. 

A hundred and twenty million Hindoos would give up their 
lives rather than harm should befall the Hanuman, the partic- 
ular kind of monkey they regard as sacred. An incredible num- 
ber of monkey asylums are kept up in India ; sixteen hundred 
are in the presidency of Bengal alone, sustained by the poorest 
of people. The dog-headed Thoth was worshipped by Egyptians 
and the cat-headed god Pacht was supposed to preside over child- 
birth, and cats being sacred to this goddess the killing of a com- 
mon cat was punished by death. Tons of cat mummies are 
dug up. 

Sir John Lubbock 6 treats of religion and tells of a Kaffir puz- 
zling over natural events without result, but remarks that sav- 
ages as a rule do not think out such things, but adopt the ideas 
which suggest themselves most naturally, and notes the tendency 
of authors to credit such races with higher ideas than they pos- 
sess. He claims that the deities of savages are evil and not good ; 
these gods are to be forced into compliance with man's wishes ; 
they require blctody and rejoice in human sacrifices ; they are 
mortal, not immortal, a part of and not the author of nature; 
they are to be approached by dances rather than prayers, and 
sacred dances are quite common with savages the world over; 
and these gods often approve of what we call vice rather than 
what we esteem as virtue. 

We submit to deity, the savages try to control him ; we regard 
the deity as good, they regard him as evil ; we thank the deity 
for blessings, they think that blessings are natural, but attribute 
all evil to the interference of malignant beings. 

6 Origin of Civilization and Primitive Condition of Man, Ch. IV. 



SUPERSTITION. 155 

Lubbock divides the stages of religious evolution into what 
can be essentially condensed in these words: 

Absence of any notion of a god at first. 

A second stage where nature is full of demons who can be 
prevented from doing harm, Fetichism. 

Thirdly, natural objects, such as trees, lakes, stones, animals 
are worshipped (Totemism or nature worship). 

Fonrthlv, the superior deities are more powerful than man 
and are of a different nature. Shamanism. Their place of abode 
is also far away and accessible only to Shamans. 

Anthropomorphism comes next, or man-shaped idol w r orship, 
in which the gods take still more completely the shape of men, 
being, however, more powerful. They are still subject to being 
persuaded : they are a part of nature and not creators. They are 
represented by images or idols. 

In the next stage the deity is regarded as the author of nature, 
and becomes for the first time a supernatural being. 

Finally, as the last and highest stage morality is associated 
with religion, and Lubbock notes that Herbert Spencer regards 
moral feelings as the result of accumulated experiences of utility 
gradually organized and inherited. 

Honesty has been associated with unhappy consequences and 
subterfuges, and lying dishonesty have been and are admired still 
by many savage and barbarous people as accomplishments, but 
while personal honesty has been found to be inconvenient the 
honesty of others is a thing to be praised and cultivated because 
honesty of others affords the happiest consequences to yourself, 
hence it should be taught to others and encouraged because ben- 
efit to self may occur from it. 

Our ancestors, says Lubbock, have felt that some things were 
right and others were wrong, but at different times they have 
had very different codes of morality. It was right to steal from 
strangers or to murder them until finally it ceased to be the 
proper thing to do. Hence we have a deep-seated moral feeling 
but no decided moral code. Children have a feeling of right and 
wrong, but do not have an intuitive knowledge of what is right 
or wrong. A child whose parents belong to different nations 
with different moral codes may have the moral feelings, and yet 



156 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

might have no settled ideas as to particular moral duties. It 
learns these from others. Authority seems to Lubbock to be 
the origin, utility and criterion of virtue. Parents, preachers or 
the law dictate what is to be considered proper, the child is not 
born with knowledge of it, but may desire to do what others re- 
gard as right. When the deity was regarded as beneficent then 
he became moral, and not before. Savages could not conceive 
of a good god, and this sacred character could not arise until 
morality had been appended to religion. Today among civilized 
people the masses entertain a mixture of beliefs in a deity, or 
several gods, who are good and evil, moral but revengeful, all- 
powerful, knowing everything, and yet idiotic in their exactions. 
The good person attributes all his moral nature to his deity, but 
authority bids him believe in a furious, dangerous, cruel demon, 
who is the same as the good god. Much primitive foolishness 
and clownish behavior survives in the estimation of the average 
deity of civilization. 

Spencer supports Tyler's view that ancestor worship is a fac- 
tor in religion origin, and ghost propitiation is a consequence, but 
Lubbock holds that primitive man had no religion. Ancestor 
regard could easily have arisen through the parental control com- 
pelling the children to abject submissiveness, which was event- 
ually more or less an inherited condition, and among unpro- 
gressive tyrannical people it could become exaggerated, as with 
the Chinese, but among advancing nations such as the Americans 
this is reduced to parental affection, with at times too little re- 
gard for the advice of ancestry. Old men among savages teach 
respect for themselves and enforce it, but force would avail noth- 
ing where there is freedom of thought and public education. 

Brinton 7 says: "The lowest religions seem to have in them 
the elements which exist in the ripest and noblest, and these ele- 
ments work for good wherever they exist. However rude the 
form of belief in agencies above those of the natural world, in a 
higher law than that confessedly of solely human enactment, and 
in a standard of duty presented by something loftier than imme- 
diate advantage, such a belief must prompt the individual to a 
salutary self-discipline which will steadily raise him with nobler 

7 Religion of Primitive Peoples, p. 215. 



SUPERSTITION. 157 

conceptions of the aims of life. When he feels himself under 
the protection of some unseen but ever near beneficent power 
his emotions of gratitude and love will be stimulated, and when 
he recognizes in the ceremonial law a divine prescription for his 
welfare and that of his tribe he will cheerfully submit to the rig- 
ors of its discipline." Brinton traces the lines of religious thought 
through, first, the primitive social bond. Second, the family and 
position of woman. Third, the growth of jurisprudence. Fourth, 
the development of ethics. Fifth, the advance in positive knowl- 
edge. Sixth, the fostering of the arts. Seventh, the independent 
life of the individual. Speaking to the gods by prayer and the 
alleged speaking of the gods to the people were early developed 
means of supposed communication maintained by a variety of 
motives on the part of the teacher and taught. Fear, hope and 
to gain an advantage in some way were the main incentives. 
Captain Clark 8 says : "No people pray more than Indians. Both 
superstition and custom keep always in their minds the necessity 
for placating the anger of the omnipotent and invisible power, 
and for supplicating the active exercise of his functions in their 
behalf.'' Stocks and stones, says Brinton, were never worshipped 
as such, but as having mysterious power to influence the future. 
This is idolatry, polytheism or fetichism, and a species of anim- 
ism. The idol is something else than the mere object. The fetich 
spirit lives in a tree. If the fetich does not bring luck it is burned, 
thrown away, or broken. The sale of lucky talismans, mascots, 
fetiches, by one savage or another, has in it the beginning of 
priestcraft. The bethel of the Hebrews was a stone the god was 
supposed to inhabit. The holy kaaba of Mohammed is a rough 
black piece of rock, a substitution or reversion to the idol 
worship overthrown by his sect. The Phrygian image of the 
earth brought to Rome with great pomp was a small black shaped 
stone. There is a survival in our day of this ancient childishness 
in the belief in "lucky stone" mascots. Trees were supposed 
by some tribes to make the rain, an inference drawn by drip- 
ping moisture condensed by the foliage. The Chaldeans had a 
sacred tree. Innumerable are the ceremonies intended to avert 
the wrath and gain the favor of the gods of nature, and "solemn 
8 Indian Sign Language, p. 309. 



I58 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

nonsense" exists in every land and among all degrees of culture. 

Marriage and funeral rites soon become sources of profit to 
special classes who considered it their privilege to preside over 
the superstitions of the infantile minds of savages, and their 
descendants have been subjected to great inconveniences through 
the greed of many of this sacerdotal trust. For instance, in 
Puerto Rico and the Philippines the price of the marriage cere- 
mony was so absurdly high that the benighted people were com- 
pelled to mate without it in most cases. Where there is direct 
profit in this there is often a more indirect one in civilized coun- 
tries, but the Spanish provinces had not advanced to that stage. 
It was the immediate pay that was sought for religious services. 
To the Mohammedan every event of nature and life is an imme- 
diate manifestation of the power of God. 9 Among barbarians 
and their ancestry echoes were mysterious, and a word had the 
power to> do good or injury. Some Indians dread to tell their 
names for fear others will gain power over them through know- 
ing their names. Some words are too sacred to pronounce, while 
others will defile the speaker. Some numbers are also sacred 
and our figures 7 and 12 retain much of this superstitious signifi- 
cance. The carmen or charm was a song to drive away demons, 
sometimes given with medicines, a certain class of which are 
called carminatives in this day. Virgil said that a special carmen 
could drag the moon from the sky. Resonant words like "Meso- 
potamia" thrill the simple devout. 

Dreams are intimately associated with the lower forms of 
religion. During sleep the spirit seems to desert the body. And 
the great bulk of fairly educated persons in our midst are not 
aware that dreams are caused by improper action of blood ves- 
sels in influencing the registered memories in the gray matter 
of the brain. A healthy sleep is dreamless. Greenlanders believe 
in dreams and think that at night they go hunting, fishing and 
courting. When savages dream of dead friends or relations they 
firmly believe they have seen them. The beastly ventilation of 
the Eskimo hut is well calculated to poison the circulation and 
afford an extensive variety of dreams. Among uncultivated peo- 
ple dreams are regarded as omens and means of communication 

"Brinton, ibid., p. 40. 



SUPERSTITION. 1 59 

between the gods and men. Savages ascribe pain as caused by 
their enemies, and the Australian thinks his sleep is disturbed 
or pain is caused by enemies he cannot see. So the delusions of 
persecution of some insane persons can be explained as an en- 
feeblement of the later acquired reasoning power that enables 
correction of these primitive impulses to account for personal 
discomfort, a reversion to savage brain state ; in melancholia ow- 
ing to the poisoned circulation placing the mental faculties in 
a dream-like state, and in paranoia through suppression of the 
logical process direct, often by deformity of the brain. The 
observation of shadows and reflections in the water of himself 
and others impress the ignorant wild man with superstitious 
dread. Kamschatkans, Brinton records, relate their dreams to 
each other every morning and try to guess their meaning. The 
Eskimos regulate their daily life by their dreams to a great 
extent. Some Brazilian Indians will vacate a camp if one dreams 
of an enemy's approach. Plants that caused delirium were some- 
times taken to induce visions so as to get at the will of the gods. 
Often there is an association with some spiritual meaning of 
some matter observed and for which there was a name, such as 
breath, which on cold days these early progenitors of man could 
see in the frosty fog from their mouths. We have Max Mutter's 
authority for spiritus being derived from spirare to draw breath. 
The same applies to animus from anima, air. The root is an, 
which in Sanskrit means to blow. Thus the Greek thyein, to 
rush, to move violently, originated thymos the soul, the Sanskrit 
dhu to shake. But "abstract names," says Sir George William 
Cox, 10 "are the result of long thought and effort, and they are 
never congenial to the mass of men." 

Granger 11 says "all mythology and all history of beliefs must 
turn to psychology for elucidation," and A. H. Post 12 holds that 
"These laws of human thought are frightfully rigid, automatic 
and inflexible. The human mind seems to be a machine ; give it 
the same materials and it will infallibly grind out the same prod- 
uct. So deeply impressed by this is an eminent modern writer 

"Mythology of the Aryan Nations, Vol. I., p. 45. 

11 The Worship of the Romans, p. 7. 

12 Grundriss der ethnologischen Jurisprudenz, Bd. I., V. 4. 



l6o THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

that he lays it down as a fundamental maxim of ethnology that 
"we do not think, thinking merely goes on within us !" 

Brinton enumerates five special stimuli to the religious emo- 
tions : 

1. Dreaming and allied conditions. 

2. The apprehension of life and death from which arises the 
notion of the soul. 

3. The perception of light and darkness. 

4. The observations of extraordinary exhibitions of force. 

5. The impression of vastness. 

Religions, like organisms or institutions, have a natural his- 
tory ; they rise, spread and fade away, and just as each ignorant 
tribe fancies it is the only people worth saving or knowing any- 
thing about, so it claims to have the only true religion. 

Benjamin Franklin defined superstition as religion out of 
fashion and religion as superstition in fashion. "Orthodoxy 
was," furthermore, "my doxy, and heterodoxy your doxy." There 
is no one belief or set of beliefs which make up a religion. Budd- 
hism rejects the ideas of gods, souls, or divine government of the 
world ; the Jewish old Testament and the old Roman religion 
did not admit existence of souls or immortal life. Some believe 
in souls and not in gods, while divine government is rare in sav- 
age minds. Savages do not, as a rule, recognize principles of 
good and evil or doctrines of reward or punishment hereafter for 
conduct in the present life." The happy hunting grounds are 
for those who are brave and kill enemies, and, among the Black- 
feet, not for those who are hanged, but these are exceptions in 
the beliefs of multitudes of other savages. 

Belief means a mere impression and also a conviction from 
evidence. An Irishman defined faith as that God given faculty 
that enabled a man to believe what he knows is not true. The 
"beliefs" of the past and present are beyond computation, but a 
general grouping is possible. Fatalism, for instance, pervades 
Mohammedanism, Calvanism and numerous other religions. The 
Greeks were firm believers in fatalism, and that man could not 
escape his destiny. Even today there are fairly intelligent per- 
sons who believe that the insane are possessed by devils. The 
American Indian sees his soul in the mirror or stream, the spir- 



SUPERSTITION. IDI 

itualist sees telepathy proved by the x-ray. Shapes of clouds, vol- 
canic eruptions, lightning and thunder, all unusual things, at 
once are grounds for superstitious dread. When such things 
become familiar and constant they often lose their superstitious 
interpretation. "Astonished at the performances of the English 
plow the Hindoos paint it, set it up and worship it, thus turning 
a tool into an idol. Linguists do the same with language ! 13 

"The religious inclination of man is part of his mental con- 
struction. In the nature and laws of the human mind, in its in- 
tellect, sympathies, emotions and passions, lie the well-springs 
of all religions, modern or ancient, Christian or heathen ; to 
these we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever errors, 
falsehoods, bigotry or cruelty have stained man's creeds and cults, 
and to them we must credit whatever truth, piety and love have 
hallowed and glorified his long search for the perfect and the 
eternal. Missionaries would not recognize as religion the beliefs 
which were so different from and inferior to their own. Ghosts, 
magic and charms were superstitions. Religion is shown to have 
existed among neolithic men by numberless sepulchers of peoples, 
massive mounds and temples such as Stonehenge and Karnac, 
by tens of thousands, their idols, amulets and mystic symbols, 
their altars and talismans. But palaeolithic man of the continen- 
tal glacier period left nothing to show he had religion. The tabu 
means exile or death for taking prohibited articles of food and 
drink, for infringing laws of marriage and social relation, dispo- 
sition of property and choice of wives. The Dyaks of Borneo 
consult their gods on all occasions of business or journeying. It 
shocked the Pueblos to see white settlers planting corn without 
any ceremony, and still more to see how the corn flourished. This 
did more to shatter their simple faith than a dozen missionary 
crusades. Some will not acknowledge that there is any religion 
whatever except their own, all other beliefs are heresies, aposta- 
sies and heathenism. A protestant denounces Roman Catholi- 
cism as superstitious, and Quakers regard all external rites as 
equally superstitious." 14 

13 Herbert Spencer, Essay on Style. 

14 Brinton, ibid., p. 27. 



l62 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Edward Clodd 15 summarizes myths as personifications of the 
powers of nature, as the sun, moon, stars, earth, sky, storm, light- 
ning, light and darkness. The devil was the king of all the agents 
of disaster, disease, sorcery, wizards, enchanters, who had sold 
their souls to him. "It was not enough for the ignorant and 
frightened sufferers to accuse some misshapen, squinting old wo- 
man of casting on them the evil eye or of appearing in the form 
of a cat, to secure her trial by torture and her condemnation to an 
unpitied death. The spread of the popular terror led to the issue 
of proclamations by the pope and statutes in England and other 
countries against witchcraft, and it was not till late in the 18th 
century that laws against imaginary crimes were repealed." 

There is a barbaric confusion of things with their mere names, 
and among a certain class of insane of the paranoiac type there 
is found occasionally a positive craze as to the mystic meanings 
of words, seeming as though this word reverence were a rever- 
sion to barbaric ancestral traits of many thousands of years ago. 
This is in such primitive minds associated with the belief in the 
medical or superstitious virtue of perfectly worthless things, the 
reality of dreams, a theory of disease being caused by demons, 
witches or sorcerers, the evil eye, etc., belief in a second self or 
soul, in the souls of animals, plants, etc., and in a soul's dwelling 
place. At times, as in India, there is found belief in the change 
of men into animals, and elsewhere is belief in descent from 
plants or animals. Myths arise secondarily from the use of equiv- 
ocal words, the confounding and the misinterpreting of ancestral 
or foreign fables, just as children get things mixed today and 
pass them on. Such an instance occurs in the different versions 
in separate languages of the idea of the seven stars, the dipper, 
the plough, the great bear, etc., an account of which is given by 
Cox. 16 There may occur a multiplicity of names for the same 
object, and each name becomes the groundwork of a new myth, 
as in the process bf time they are confounded with words which 
most nearly resemble them in sound. There is a tendency to local- 
ize mythical incidents, and the speech of mythology is very elastic 
as it rests on tradition. The solar myth is probably most exten- 

15 Myths and Dreams. 

18 Mythology of Aryan Nations, Vol. I., p. 47. 



SUPERSTITION. 163 

sive, but there is a constant demand for new mythical narratives, 
and there is a great vitality in the myth-making faculties. A 
transmutation of names is the historical groundwork of the Ho- 
meric Mythology and the Iliad is the Volsung tale of Norse my- 
thology. Mythical beings gradually become historical persons, 
and there is a great sameness about all tribal legends. Cox points 
to the likeness running through a vast number of the popular 
tales of Germany, Persia and Hindustan owing to the separation 
of races and re-appearance of old common legends from a time 
when the races were united in the Aryans. 

In Assyria Bheki or the frog sun is represented by the fish 
sun to show half of his time spent above and half below the 
waves. This fish god is like the Aryan Proteus or Helios. As 
Oannes or Dagon, the fish On, he is the great teacher of the 
Babylonians, and his name is seen in the Hebrew Bethaon, the 
house of the sun. The archbishop's hat, resembling a fish's head 
with eyes and mouth of the fish, is a direct survival of the head- 
gear of the priest of Dagon, the fish god of Babylonia. The an- 
cient Romans considered the river gods and the fish god very 
powerful, and fed their old people to them by throwing them 
from the bridges, and the bridge high priest was therefore called 
pontifex maximus from pons, bridge. 

There is a vulgar inclination to degrade mythical beings to 
their level by savages ; they can only conceive of gods as big 
men, and the big man idea is universal. The anthropomorphic 
attributes become adapted to the low instincts of the savages as 
their gods sink to their comprehension. Hence you can explain 
better to an Indian why the sun follows the dawn by telling him 
that each is like ourselves and governed by human-like motives, 
and that the sun chases the dawn because in love with it. 

A mythology and a moral belief may go on side by side and 
struggle for supremacy in the primitive mind, according to the 
receptivity of the people, but the mixture does not mean that all 
are influenced alike by the same religion, for one may twist the 
mythology, as Lord Bacon tried to do, into moral interpretations, 
or even with full poetical fancy conceive only the base meaning, 
though the very words may imply higher ideas. Cox says : "The 
child who will speak of the dawn and the twilight as the Achaian 



164 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

spoke of Prokno and Eos will also be cruel or false or cunning. 
There is no reason why man, in his earliest state, should not 
express his sorrow when the bright being who had gladdened 
him with his radiance dies in the evening, or feel a real joy when 
he rises again in the morning, and yet be selfish or cruel in his 
dealings with his fellows." 17 

From the old Aryan religion sprang those beliefs that were 
found scattered through Europe from Rome and Greece to Ger- 
many and Ireland. Dyaus, Zeus, Jupiter, Zio is the highest god 
among Hindoos, Greeks, Italiotes, Germans and Norse. The 
Semitic religions worshiped Bel or Bael, Belzebub, El, Malek, 
Adon, Sar as supreme. The Jewish Jehovah and Roman Jupiter 
have some superficial resemblances of sound and character, but 
were doubtless developed apart. Of course the Christian reli- 
gion is that of a Jewish sect. The Egyptian appears to be a 
mixture of early Aryan and Semitic worship, while other African 
religions are those of the Cushite, Nigritoes, Kaffirs and Hot- 
tentot, in which sun and moon gods are prominent. The Chi- 
nese ancient natural religion is now partly superceded by Confu- 
cianism, the philosophy of Kung-fu-tse, who was merely a teach- 
er, and Taoism, a revival of the old religion. Several centuries 
later Chinese Buddhism arose. The Japanese is a modified Chi- 
nese, and in the line between Asia and Europe was the Finnic 
branch of the Ural-Altaic religion. There are the aboriginal 
ideas of the American Indians, the Malayo-Polynesians original 
religion displaced by Buddhism, Mohammedanism and occasion- 
ally Christianity. The tabu abounds as a survival among them. 

W. D. Whitney distinguished between religions founded by 
individuals and race religions. Zoroaster, Christ, Mohammed 
and Buddha made headway against degenerate notions. All of 
these, with Confucius and others, have been reformers who re- 
sisted degrading tendencies of the past priesthood. But in time 
these reforms also became corrupt, and in spite of a teacher re- 
fusing to be recognized as more than a man eventually the ad- 
herents would worship him. Pleiderer 18 holds that religion was. 
at first an indistinct naturism, in which natural things were re* 

17 Sir George Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, Vol. I., p. 39. 

18 Religions philosophic auf geschichtlicher Grundlage, 1884, Vol. IL 



SUPERSTITION. 165 

garded as living powers ; then followed the worship of many 
gods regarded as manlike in form and character ; then came 
spirits in idol shapes, and finally the conception of one god in 
nature. C. P. Tiele 19 sums up the stages as, first, one in which 
every object had life (animism), with multitudes of demons who 
could be controlled by magic. Next there were the many gods 
such as the Greeks and Romans had ; sacred writings gave an- 
other shape to religion, and finally principles and maxims pre- 
vailed. Nature religions existed in which the oldest contained 
germs of the latest. Man regarded all nature as being alive 
and as having magical power. Some of these living things were 
monsters with frightful shapes, some of which survive in later 
mythologies, the sphinx, the centaur, the dragon, etc. This has 
also been called the polyzoic stage. A second stage of animism 
developed in which only the most powerful of these living things 
were worshipped, with spiritism and idolatry prominent. The 
first period of animism was that of a confused mythology in 
which there were many demons, polydemonistic, and some more 
powerful. A second period gay.e implicit belief in the power of 
magic, accounting for the high veneration in which sorcerers and 
fetich priests are held. Third came the predominance of fear 
over all other feelings and the performance of religious acts for 
selfish ends mostly. As when a Russian bows a thousand times 
to his icon to atone for some sin. 

The purified magical religions were the connecting link be- 
tween the polydaemonistic magic religion and the many shaped 
gods stage, anthropomorphic, polytheistic, animals, men, spirits 
mixed together. In this there were many survivals of the old, 
disguised under new names. The more recent ethical religions 
are Christianity, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Confucianism, 
Mazdaism, Mosaism, Judaism. 

Ethical attributes become ascribed to the gods, especially the 
highest ; as ideas of people change and improve they are apt 
to assign better motives to their gods. Ethical abstractions and 
intellectual abstractions are personified and worshiped as divine 
beings. It is not so long ago when there was a serious pro- 
posal to make an apotheosis of humanity, and when Huxley was 
19 Outline of the History of Religion. 



l66 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

asked what he thought of it he said that he would as soon think 
of making an apotheosis of a wilderness full of apes. But those 
notions occur in advanced stages of nature worship and are often 
incorporated with the old religions. Some are founded by one 
or more persons, in some cases by a body of priests or teachers, 
and he who first reveals it is asserted to be inspired, and it is said 
that the new ideas were revealed to him. Buddhism had an 
atheistic tendency, but Buddha was finally revered and worshiped 
as the Hindu supreme deity. The old Aryan was mostly anthro- 
pomorphic animism, the worship of man-shaped gods represent- 
ing natural objects. A study of the mythologies of all peoples 
reveals how the simple minds of our ancestors tried to account 
for the beginning of things in wild and senseless stories, such 
as children would invent, of the origin of men, sun, stars, ani- 
mals, death and the world in general. Pulling these gods down 
to their own understanding, they related infamous and absurd 
adventures of them, and this is why these ancient gods were 
spoken of as murderous, adulterous, incestuous, thievish and 
cruel, cannibals, and wearing the shapes of animals, and that 
they change into plants and stars or back to beasts again ; also 
why there are such repulsive stories of the states of the dead, the 
descent of the gods to places of the dead, and their return. 

The various religions can be concluded under either nature 
or ethical headings, the nature division including the greater sub- 
divisions, such as polydsemonistic, magical religions under control 
of animism, many devils in nature, entertained by savages and 
uncivilized, and those who are degraded from better states, then 
the purified or organized magical religions as the result of some 
reformer getting control of the nonsense and compromising with 
the priests who lived on superstitions. The Therianthropic Poly- 
theism unorganized contained the oldest Japanese, Indian, Arabic, 
Slavonic, Italiote, Graeco-Roman, Etruscan and Finnish, while 
the later organized forms were found in Egypt, Babylon, China 
and America. A later worship of man-like but superhuman and 
semi-ethical beings, Anthropomorphic Polytheism, affords the 
ancient Vaidic of India, the Iranic of Bactria, Media and Persia, 
the younger Babylonian and Assyrian, the Semitic, Phoenician, 
Canaanite, Aramean, Sabean, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic and 



SUPERSTITION. 167 

Graeco-Roman. The other great class, the ethical religions, con- 
tain religious communities depending upon sacred books. These 
are Taoism and Confucianism in China, Brahmanism, Primitive 
Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, or Mazdaism, Mosaism, Judaism, and 
bv natural selection there have arisen three dominant forms di- 
viding the world between them — Islamism, Buddhism and Chris- 
tianity. 

As to primitive ideas Powell says the North American Indians 
are agitated over the questions, do the trees grow or are they 
created? Some take the ground that the great trees like the 
sequoia are created just as they are found, but all the other trees 
grow. Somewhat similar to the notion among some white people 
that man was created as he is found, but that all animals may 
have evolved. 

Powell holds to four stages of mythology, whatever happens 
some one does it; that some one has a will and works as he 
pleases. Personality is the base of this philosophy. The persons 
are the gods of mythology. The world is a temple of gods. 

1. In the lowest and earliest stage everything has life, per- 
sonality, will, design; animals have all the power of mankind, 
all inanimate objects are supposed to be alive, trees think and 
speak, stones have loves and hates, the hills, waters and stars are 
alive. Everything is a god, hecastotheism. 

2. Then follows discrimination between the dead and living 
things, between the animals and the inanimate, but the animals 
still have human traits : Zootheism when men worship beasts. 
Everything is done by these gods. 

3. A wide stage then develops between man and animals. 
The animal gods are dethroned ; physitheism. The gods become 
strictly man-shaped, anthropomorphic. Hence there are gods of 
the sun, of the day, air and night, etc. 

4. Mental, moral and social characteristics are personified 
and deified. Thus we have a god of war, of love, of revelry, of 
plenty. 

This may be called psychotheism, which develops into one 
god worship, monotheism, and then pantheism, the one god being 
everywhere. 

The invention or adoption of the alphabets runs parallel in 



l68 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

races with psychotheism, and all these stages may exist by sur- 
vival at the same period. As an outgrowth of mythological phi- 
losophy Powell mentions "ancientism," or the belief that yester- 
day was better than today, that the ancients were wiser than we, 
a belief quite universal. Yesterday is greater than today by 
natural exaggeration and absorption of beliefs from older gener- 
ations. China is satisfied with ancient teaching only. So recent 
periods are considered as degenerate and man has become lower 
than he originally was. 

Another outgrowth of superstition was the idea that the gods 
had families, and spiritism notions came from dreams in which 
there were strange scenes and wonderful activities, memories of 
scenes and experiences of former days and inherited memories 
of scenes witnessed and actions performed by ancestors are 
blended in strange confusion by broken and inverted sequences. 

Great men when they die have a tendency to become wor- 
shipped as gods. The ancient Egyptians promoted their gods 
until Amon was made the biggest, and finally the kings succeeded 
in being worshipped just as they would today if they could, judg- 
ing from Emperor Wilhelm's remarks. Then as the Emperor 
Hadrian caused Antinous, his favorite adopted son, to be wor- 
shipped as a god, so there was a direct creation of deities through 
mere imperial caprice. Conquerers often converted the gods of 
the conquered into devils, or when concessions had to be made 
the two religions mixed and old ceremonies took new forms and 
surroundings. The Christians permitted many old gods to be 
saints, and festivities such as Yule Tide, Noel and Weihnachtsfest 
and the Saturnalia passed into the new observances. 

Indefinite old legends keep people on the alert for the pre- 
dicted end of the world, etc. The Aztecs were overwhelmed 
with superstitious regard for the Spaniards, and Montezuma 
looked upon them as the predicted children of the sun who were 
to come from the east again, the former Quetzalcoatl. x\fter 
Montezuma's death he took the place of the expected one in the 
minds of the simple Mexican Indians, and nowadays a watch is 
kept by a sentinel, who looks every morning to the sunrise for 
Montezuma's return. For four hundred years fires had been 
kept burning on Mexican Catholic church altars as part of the 



SUPERSTITION. 169 

old Aztec Montezuma worship surviving among- new surround- 
ings. 

Very childish were some of the ancient notions that sufficed 
to found a religion. A great Chinese philosophy is based upon 
a system of three lines similar to the markings on the back of a 
tortoise and this inclination to symbolism we find among certain 
logically defective insane among the civilized. 

Extensive religious movements have originated in conditions 
behind the apparent ones. Peter the Hermit and his harangues 
have been blamed for the first crusades, but the crying agricul- 
tural, social and political needs were the main incentives, and 
the church gave the impulse to the movements. 20 

Devastating plagues that sweep the world originate in centres 
of densest ignorance, to be conveyed with lessened effect to rela- 
tively more enlightened parts. This relativity is with reference 
to increased cleanliness as to food, habits, intercourse, ideas, 
knowledge of the environment, and decreased religious fervor, 
disposition to be priest-ridden, dirty, credulous, superstitious, 
and brutal generally. The thoughtful, cleanly races are the 
breakers against which the pestilence rages in vain, and the 
bigoted, uncleanly, superstitious afford the materials for its in- 
crease and spread. The oriental pilgrimages to Mecca and the 
Upper Ganges are the means by which cholera is propagated. 
In these "holy" spots the multitudes of devout swarm and reek, 
the filthy "holy" wells from which they drink and in which they 
bathe have accumulated ages of defilement. Dr. Shakespeare 
says it would require two soldiers to each pilgrim to preserve 
order and cleanliness and induce observance of the ordinary 
decency or precautions against the spread of all sorts of diseases 
that are fostered by filth. When Mecca is the starting point the 
disease takes the southern Mediterranean route through Italy 
and Spain. Here, again, ignorance, superstition and filth give 
it fresh impetus. Physicians are accused of being responsible for 
the plague and are slain, the shrines that Garibaldi closed up are 
opened again, and the dirty wretches crowd about their wooden 
and stone images imploring relief from them. 

20 Prutz Kulturgeschichte der Kreuzzuge. 



iyo THE 'EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

When India is the starting point the famine-stricken, abjectly 
ignorant and religious peasantry of Russia afford fertilization 
enough to kill three thousand daily. Physicians are also mur- 
dered in that country. 

As Balzac says 21 : "If any good is to be done we come into 
collision not merely with vested interests but with something far 
more dangerous to meddle with, religious ideas crystallized into 
superstitions, the most permanent form taken by human 
thought." 

Votaries of a religion of blood are not all cruel, for even in 
Thibet there are lamas who dislike the spirit dances, cruelty and 
deceit, and are made to suffer for their humanity by other lamas. 

Similarly many excellent monks and priests have tried to stem 
the torrent of most pernicious systems. The very best men in 
any organization will often be among the lowest in rank, and 
where intriguery, politics, wire-pulling, conspiracy exist the very 
worst are often at the top. Savonarola, in the fifteenth century, 
fought for purity of his church, and so did Luther in the six- 
teenth, both against corruption in high places which trod upon 
the sincere, devout and lowly in the ranks of the monks and 
priests. 

Many an enthusiastic missionary has been sent to the canni- 
bals, and the reveling, feasting superiors at home point to his 
history as evidence of how good the order is. But there are good 
and bad everywhere and in every organization, but so long as 
men seek office the selfish schemer will usually be highest in both 
church and state. 

Christ, Confucius, Savonarola, Buddha, Luther were all re- 
formers, and suffered in consequence, and the history of religions 
is full of the failure of attacks of reformers upon vested in- 
terests. 

The basic motives for certain measures or opposition thereto 
are often amusingly revealed in queer combinations, such as the 
conjoint, clerical and saloonkeepers' movement to close the 
world's fair on Sunday in Chicago; the liquor dealers outside 
wanted to draw custom to themselves by closing the fair. 

21 Le Medecin de Campagne. 



SUPERSTITION. 1 7 1 

The efforts of Dr. Holt of New Orleans in fighting yellow 
fever were made unnecessarily troublesome by many selfish in- 
terests opposed to work wholly for the public good. He found 
powerful political, clerical and mercantile enemies, intent upon 
some comparatively trifling gain, arrayed against him, and occa- 
sionally a press subsidized in the interests of ignorant and, in 
this instance, murderous greed. 

Chicago luminaries representing the "Department of Reli- 
gion" at the World's Fair summoned a congress of teachers and 
members of all faiths to indicate how deep were the foundations 
of theism and faith in immortality, blandly and densely unaware 
that many highly developed religions have neither belief in deity 
or immortality. 

There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with 
a belief in a god, and races exist without an idea of deity. Mis- 
sionaries among the Northwest tribes of American Indians had 
to invent an expression for the soul by stating it was an "intes- 
tine that never rotted" ; the old word sacrum had the same sig- 
nificance among the ancient Romans as a bone that never per- 
ished. 

Fuegians thought that if food were wasted storms, wind and 
rain came as a punishment. As Lubbock remarked, "a horrible 
dread of unknown evil hangs over savage life and embitters 
every pleasure," and it is the unseen terror that appalls the most, 
the unknown, that is dreaded more than anything known. 

In keeping with the lowest races being the most superstitious, 
David Hume asks : "What age or period of life is most addicted 
to superstition ? The weakest and most timid. What sex ? The 
same answer may be given. The leaders and examples of every 
kind of superstition, says Strabo, are the women." 

In the Cathedral of St. Peter at Rome is the spear of St. Lon- 
ginius, which is said to have been found in Jerusalem by the Em- 
press of Germany, Helena, the mother of Constantine. In 1492 
the Sultan of Bejazet sent the lance to the pope from Constan- 
tinople. But there is a rival lance at Vienna, and each has its 
adherents that it was the one that pierced the side of Christ. The 
cardinals remain neutral. There are also two skulls of St. John 



172 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

on exhibition at rival churches in Rome, both of which are offi- 
cially declared to be authentic by a special miracle. 

The Basilica was replaced by St. Peter's church and all the 
best marbles of ancient temples were used in building the new 
temple. Even the statue of that saint, with its great toe kissed 
away, is a copy of the Capitoline Jupiter cast from bronzes of 
the pagan gods. So the rehabilitation of Rome physically is par- 
alleled by its spiritual resurrection. "The ghost of pagan Rome 
sits on its own grave.'' 

Probably one of the most fantastic superstitions on record was 
caused by the crusaders bringing back milk in bottles which they 
sold as the milk of the Virgin Mary, and a piece of the finger of 
the holy ghost. 22 

Comical instances of inconsistency come down to us from not 
only historical but archaeological periods, such as when John, 
1204, turned his back on the mass and scoffed at the priests, but 
never started on a journey without hanging relics around his 
neck. 23 Dr. Clay, the Babylonian archaeologist, showed me an 
inscription which he interpreted to mean that "this valuable piece 
of lapiz lazuli is presented to the god Baal by a devout wor- 
shipper," and the offering is a worthless piece of glass palmed 
off upon the deity; this was from the Nippur collection, dating 
back beyond the days of Abraham. 

The Delphian oracles were as glib in explaining away their 
failures of prophecy as a modern clairvoyant. "Croesus, after his 
defeat and captivity, sent messengers to reproach the Delphian 
oracle with misleading to ruin by false predictions one who had 
merited the favor of the gods by the magnificence of his offerings. 
He gave so much the oracles thought they must make him happy 
with good luck promises. They replied that his fifth ancestor 
had sinned, and Croesus had to expiate his crime." 24 

Advance and ambition led Croesus against the Parthians. but 
superstitious terrors hampered him. A Roman tribune devoted 
him to the infernal gods with solemn nonsense. ^Prodigies were 
seen in his crossing the Euphrates and treachery took advantage 

"Draper, Conflict of Religion and Science, p. 276. 

23 Green, History of England, p. 152. 

24 Herodotus, I., 91. 



M PKRSTITION, 173 

oi his fears to turn him against his friends and lead him to his 
enemies. The Parthians fell upon his army with frightful noises, 
knowing that the heart can be appalled by din. 

Xenophen said that '"the Lacedemonians always during a war 
put up their petitions early in the morning in order to be before- 
hand with their enemies, and by being the first solicitors pre- 
engage the gods in their favor. Early mass may be for similar 
reas 

Another survey of superstitious fear may be stated as at first 
indefinite, unorganized and scarcely classifiable, merely a lot of 
ish fears and notions generally. Then a few persons dis- 
cern a chance to make a profit out of these fears and organize 
the mythologies, and in the course of time a few reformers seek 
to cut off some absurdities, but the sorcerers fear loss of their 
power and object to any changes of the kind. Finally some 
changes occur by outside pressure to which the priesthood is 
compelled to adjust itself, and a stronger system may appear 
from the outside and the old and new beliefs commingle. After 
a while men grow to higher notions, and some of these become 
incorporated with the idea of gods. Things of any note, good 
or bad, are apt to be credited to the gods. The highest ideas 
finally become severed from rewards and punishments, and exist 
by themselves without fear or favor, and separate themselves 
from creeds or beliefs. Notwithstanding the superstitions and 
often evil nature of early religions the ethical, particularly among 
Christians, that has developed upon this unpromising ground- 
work, is among well-disposed civilized persons a feeling of reli- 
gious devotion that is highly complex, and consists of love, sub- 
mission to a mysterious superior, dependence, fear, reverence, 
gratitude, hope and other elements. The deep love of the dog 
for its master has been compared to it. 

Babism-'" arose as a protest against corruption in the Moham- 
medan church. Believers in it were those who thought it was 
the fulfilling of the Koran,. those who saw in it hope of national 
reform, mystics, and those to whom the teaching appeals in a 
general way, and finally in America those who believe Babism 
as a fulfillment of Christianity. A million converts exists, three 
- E. D. Ro>>, Prof. Persian, Cal. Univ., N. A. Review, April, 1901 . 



i74 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 



thousand of whom are in America, and a third of these in Chi- 
cago. 

Mormonism flourished since its originating period, which ex- 
tended from 1805 to 1830, when Joseph Smith fabricated some 
silly revelations which he engraved on metal plates and buried, 
and later dug up and interpreted by means of a holy piece of 
transparent stone. The inscriptions are just such trashy marks 
as a plough boy ignorant of anthropology in any form could 
originate. A community was started in Nauvoo, Illinois, which 
was driven out and took refuge in Salt Lake City, Utah, where 
polygamy became a leading feature of the cult. These barbarous 
settlers at Mountain Meadow in 1857 massacred a company of 
emigrants who were passing through their country, and in other 
ways their violations of law and affronts to decency led to their 
final overthrow, at least as to sacerdotal strength. It is told of 
Brigham Young, their late leader, that he contrived his apparent 
death with the intention of resurrecting himself, to make a strong 
impression upon the Mormons, but his rivals managed that he 
should not be resurrected. 

The great religious controversy of the 4th century over the 
mystery of the trinity was settled by the triumph of the doctrine 
of Athanasius over Aurius ; then arose a still more bitter dispute 
over the mystery of the incarnation. Bloody tumults, murders 
and fierce revolutionary conspiracies followed for sixty years 
over the question whether there was one nature or two natures 
in Christ. 

Monarchs alone often gave impetus to the most cruel instincts. 
From 1555 to 1559 occurred the opening of the dark and bloody 
reign of Philip II of Spain. Malignity, perfidy, evil and plotting 
industry with slavish superstition marked this period. 

The original society of Assassins was an order like the Tem- 
plars, a branch of the Egyptian Ishmaelites, with the motto "Be- 
lieve nothing and dare everything." They would kill a sultan 
or commit suicide. Of an opposite character were the mystics 
of the 17th century with their theory of abstract contemplation 
to find out God. Quietism it has been called. It was enough 
to induce imbecility, but a similar introspective fit resulted in 



SUPERSTITION. 175 

Ignatius de Loyala founding an order "for the greater glory-af 
God" that filled the earth with trickery, woe and blood. 

Through the fragmentary sayings of Mohammed runs the 
idea of the unity of God, his sovereignty, his terrible might and 
yet his compassion. Merely a man's conception of deity, as that 
of a big man, strong, angry, malicious and sometimes forgiving. 
The Islam religion admits five prophets before Mohammed, each 
greater than the previous ones: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses 
and Jesus. Mahdi is to be the highest. Those claiming to be 
the Mahdi are beyond number among the Persians, Turks, Egyp- 
tians and Arabs of the Soudan. 26 

The Flaggellants of the 14th century thought they could 
please God by scourging themselves, because they distrusted the 
church and priests as means of intercession. The order spread 
rapidly over Europe till the pope finally suppressed it. 

It is an important matter to decide why there is such a thing 
as religious hatred and prejudice? Why the odium theologicum? 
Is it a part of the offence when others merely differ with you on 
any topic? Some cannot stand contradiction of any kind. But 
it must be deeper rooted, for religious intolerance is deep and 
fades only as all religion is given up, and even then the atheist 
can be intolerant and hate the religious and see no good in them. 
Prescott, in his history of Cortez, speaking of the horrible 
Aztec human sacrifices and the equally cruel Spanish conquests, 
says ''strange that the most fiendish passions of the human heart 
have been those kindled in the name of religion." "God-fearing 
armies are the best armies," says Carlyle, and Bagehot notes that 
"high concentration of feeling makes men dare everything and do 
everything." 

The poor crazy lass Joan of Arc, with her ideas of having 
direct commands from heaven, managed to fire the confidence 
and courage of the French, who for a hundred years had been 
scurrying away from English invaders. Religious conviction 
made the French formidable, which they had not been previously. 
Cromwell recognized the value of bigotry in war and effectively 
used it. 

28 The Mahdi, Past and Present, Ch. 1, p. 2, J. Darmsteter. 



176 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Patricius Christianized Ireland long before there was a pope, 
so the Irish did not recognize his right to "Peter's pence," a 
penny tax on every house, but Henry II of England, to appease 
the pope for Becket's murder, offered to coerce Ireland to popery, 
and Dermond Macmurragh, a king of Ireland, betrayed his coun- 
try to the English. Such matters are usually unmentioned in the 
average histories, even though Macauley, Pepys, Dickens, or other 
fact-seekers record them. You do not encounter such observa- 
tions often as that "Friar Tetzel, with a bad character, sold in- 
dulgences to beautify St. Peter's at Rome, and Henry VIII 
abused Luther for daring to find fault with Tetzel, and hired Sir 
Thomas Moore, whom he afterwards beheaded, to write a book 
at which the pope was so well pleased he gave Henry VIII the 
title "Defender of the Faith," and the same king abandoned pope, 
church and former faith and became intemperate in matters of 
wives. 

Charles Dickens, 27 in simple language describes the great reli- 
gious commotion when thousands of all ranks and conditions 
left for Jerusalem on the first crusade. "All were not zealous 
Christians. Vast numbers were restless, idle, profligate and ad- 
venturers ; some went for love of change or in hope of plunder, 
some because they had nothing to do at home, some because the 
priests told them to go, some to see foreign countries, others to 
knock men about and would as soon knock a Turk about as a 
Christian." Sir J. Stephen 28 dwells on the great "brutality and 
destructiveness of the crusaders," as have other historians, but 
the popular notion is slow to expire that these invasions were 
wise and divinely directed. They were really the means of work- 
ing off surplus energy directed by bigotry and ignorance, and 
the blood letting that resulted quieted Europe somewhat, but not 
till several failures had been made in the same line. 

The castes of India are based upon "purity of blood." An 
infinite number of castes are grouped under four kinds, the 
priests or Brahmans, the soldiers, the merchants and the servile 
class. They love to think that their universal classification of 
different castes, as the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of Brahma 

27 Child's History of England, p. 57. 

28 Lectures on History of France. 



superstition; 177 

is a divine arrangement. They are exclusive and will not eat 
or marry out of their castes. Of course the Brahmans increased, 
as they were to be supported by charity. There are fourteen mil- 
lion of them, about one to each Hindoo god. 

These very old religions may survive among degenerate peo- 
ple, both people and religions being anachronisms, while in some 
cases both may die out, as did the Egyptian, which kept the dead 
as mummies with a roll or book of the dead to help the deceased 
through hades. In South America many whites have sunk to 
fetichism, which is a combination of ancient savage observance 
mixed with Christianity, and passing under the latter title. 

The religion of a race is merely culture and instruction, 
whether low or high grade. In Thomas a Becket's day it was 
thought to be the height of religious culture to be very dirty and 
to have vermin. 

The origin of sects is quite instructive and reveals the simple 
basis upon which they rest. The theosophists started through a 
joke played on a superstitious gentleman by some college pro- 
fessors. They Jed him to think some Hindoo revelations were 
sent to him. The methodists started in a college nick-name of a 
small society of students at Oxford in 1729. John Wesley was 
the master spirit of the society. Mohammed and Swedenborg 
were epileptics, though having considerable force of character, 
but dominated by delusions and hallucinations, as so many other 
religious innovators were. John of Leyden, the founder of ana- 
baptism, was insane homicidally. John Calvin was bloodthirsty 
and cruel in his beliefs and practice, though in keeping with his 
period. The puritans burned witches at the stake in New Eng- 
land, though professing Christ's teaching of love and forgive- 
ness. Manzoni 29 tells of persons in many epidemics, 1530 to 
1630, in Lombardy being burned as witches and blamed as spread- 
ers of the plague. Even "learned men" claimed that the comet 
of 1628 caused the Milan Epidemic of 1630. 

Human sacrifices were very common as an outgrowth of ani- 
mal and plant offerings, from a feeling that the gods should have 
the highest class of gift, and it is surprising how universal this 

" I Promessi Sposi, p. 483. 



178 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

practice was. The Druids drenched England and Europe with 
their altar blood. Burdick (Foundation Rites) describes the cus- 
tom of burying alive in corner-stones. Asia and Africa in various 
ways destroyed human beings to appease deities, while the Mexi- 
can and South American Indians probably exceeded all others in 
this infamy. Other religions kept up the sacrifice but in disguised 
ways. The horrible Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions were 
substitutes, the Crusade and other "holy wars," whether by Mo- 
hammedans or Christians, offered up human life freely. Directly 
or indirectly these superstitious cults are deadly. An Amish 
preacher in Pennsylvania forbid the petting of a child by a father 
as sinful, claiming that all love should be reserved for God. The 
family quarrel that followed resulted in the father killing his 
entire family ; as degenerates crowd such cults it is remarkable 
that more such things do not happen. Probably they are not 
heard from usually. The Quakers and Shakers were probably 
the most harmless of all sects and in spite of it they appear to be 
dying out. Eddyism manages to be murderous in withholding 
aid to sufferers who die unattended properly. The tendency of 
this depravity is to harden the heart and kill off all sympathy. 
Dowieism is a mere confidence game of a collossal criminal degen- 
erate who robs his congregation in the most open manner and 
also permits the sick to perish unaided. He is worshipped as 
Elijah II, and it is expected that he will promote himself further 
when practicable. A paranoiac named Teed taught that the earth 
was hollow and we lived inside of it. He built up quite a harem 
which he called heaven. He and a man named Schweinfurth in- 
duced many to give up their money and families to them in return 
for the privilege of worshipping them. 

Predictions that the end of the world was coming have con- 
stantly been made, the most notable being in A. D. 1,000, but 
even as late as 1840 the Millerites in America prepared their as- 
cension robes and sold off their property, giving the money to 
preachers of the doctrine to be distributed among the poor, but 
the preachers were thrifty and argued that the poor would not 
need it if the world ended. 

Bitter quarrels and bloodshed have occurred over such ques- 
tions as to how many souls can dance on the point of a needle. 



SUPERSTITION. 1 79 

The iconoclastic controversy of the eighth century began with the 
Greek Emperor Phillipicus Bardanns suppressing image and pic- 
ture worship. Constantine the Roman pontiff denounced him. 
Leo, another emperor, in 726 commanded all images except that 
of Christ on the cross to be taken from the church. The priests 
and monks who made money by the sales of images raised a re- 
bellion. Charlemagne assembled three hundred bishops in 794 
and they condemned image worship, but vested interests in the 
superstition still prevail. 

In 1420 the Hussite wars of Bohemia were due to the papal 
refusal to agree to the following articles: 

1. The word of God to be freely preached. 

2. The sacrament to be administered in both forms. 

3. The clergy to possess no property or temporal power. 

4. All sins to be punished by the proper authorities. 

Huss denounced indulgences and was in turn excommuni- 
cated, tried by a clerical mob, condemned and burned at the stake 
in 141 5. The chalice branch of the Hussites demanded wine for 
the laity at the sacrament. In this Hussite war one hundred 
towns and fifteen villages were destroyed. Finally the Hussites 
conquered and were invited to a conference with the papists, but 
could not agree. In 1648 there were but 700,000 left of four 
million in Bohemia after the war. 

In ancient Babylonia, forty centuries B. C, the offices of priest 
and king were united in the "patesis." Sargon, who reigned in 
3800 B. C, was among these priest-kings, and not only did this 
governing class profit by the unintelligence of the masses but 
oriental commercial enterprise guarded itself with lies, as in 
Phoenicia, to discourage competition and conceal. the origin of 
articles. The trees from which they obtained the frankincense in 
Arabia were reported to be guarded by winged serpents ; 30 the 
lake where cassia was gathered was infested by winged bats, 31 and 
cinnamon was in high, inaccessible rocks. Mercantile explorers 
concealed their geographical discoveries as zealously as priests 
who desire to perpetuate ignorance, for more can be made from 

30 Herodotus 3, 107. 
31 1 Kings, 3, no. 



iSo THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

it, as to this day public schools are fought as destroyers of profits 
to the cruel and oppressive. 

The tooth of some gigantic extinct animal is exhibited by Cey- 
lon priests periodically as a sacred relic of Buddha, as the coat of 
Christ is shown in Treves. 

Sir Edwin Arnold remarked that "The extravagances which 
disfigure the record and practices of Buddhism are to be referred 
to that inevitable degradation which priesthoods always inflict 
upon great ideas committed to their charge." 

The sacred city of Lhasa in Thibet is forbidden to foreigners 
by the Buddhists and indeed the entire country is hostile to them. 
Jn this city is the great temple of Potala of the Dalai, or Grand 
Lama, who is regarded as the reincarnation of Buddha the god. 
He is really a boy, and always dies young under the guardianship 
of the dreaded Gyalpo, the temporal ruler of Lhasa. The palace 
is built on a great rock, and the poor Grand Lama is concealed at 
the top of the ninth story, which is the summit, and never allowed 
out. This sort of figure-head worship is worth study as founded 
upon a very widely distributed human disposition to reverence 
the mysterious, the unknown, the talked about but unseen. When 
people are monkeys enough to let a set of sharpers hide their 
ruler and really reign in his stead they will gulp all sorts of yarns 
about his wonderful powers, nor do the priesthood care to have 
more than indirect power, for as the mouthpiece of the god they 
can exert more power than were they to claim to be divine direct. 
The Japanese mikado was thus held as too holy to be seen, and 
a rascally subordinate fooled the people and ruled instead till the 
overthrow of the usurper, and in the Philippines the insurgent 
generals tried this trick by killing each other off and giving out 
that the dead chief was too exalted to be seen, but that his orders 
were being carried out. While mankind is content to let a special" 
class of confidence men set themselves up as interpreters of a hid- 
den ruler, either in the top of a building or in the sky, mankind 
will receive precisely the consequences of such simplicity. 

As an evidence of the kind of morality that may become at- 
tached to a religion, in Thibet no man may have more than one 
wife, but women may have as many husbands as they want at 
one time. The Buddhists pray by machinery, a wheel turned by 



SUPERSTITION. iSl 

hand or water power. The priests invent hideous dances and 
disguises such as skeleton pictures on their clothing to frighten 
the childish common people. Primitive Buddhism is antagonized 
by the Lama worship, just as primitive Christianity is ignored by 
the Romish and Russian churches. Like the pope of Rome and 
his progenitor, the old Roman emperor, so in Thibet the Grand 
Lama was, through his visible representatives, the priests, sup- 
posed to have power and learning as wide as the ocean, and he is 
sometimes called the "Ocean Lama." 

Zoroaster was said to have been a king of Media who con- 
quered Babylon about B. C. 2458. Another account makes him 
the herald of a new religion which regards the universe as con- 
tended for by two principles, one of good and one of evil, but of 
course in time corruptions of this belief crept in. Wherever 
Apollo worship was fixed there were prophets and sybyls. The 
priests studied geography and physical sciences to enable them 
to appear to know other things that they did not, and to impose 
upon credulity. The Delphian oracle nonsense was as transparent 
a robbery of superstitious people as that of Dowieism. The town 
of Krissa, in Phocis, near Delphi, became great and powerful. 
The Krissseans derived great profit from the numbers of visitors. 
The sanctuary of Pytho with its administrators expanded into the 
town of Delphi. The Krissseans abused their position as masters 
of the avenue to the temple by sea, and levied exorbitant tolls on 
the visitors who landed there. They outraged women returning 
from the temple. About 595 B. C. a war was thus caused lasting 
ten years, called the first sacred war in Greece. Krissa was de- 
stroyed and the Delphians' right to rob the visitors without com- 
petition triumphed. 

The Egyotian priesthood was a sacerdotal nobility that was 
exempt from taxes, military service and forced labor. Priestly 
inscriotions declare imprecations threatening with terrible ills in 
this world and the next those who stole the smallest part of the 
gifts to the gods. The priestly possessions gradually increased 
until even in the most distressed times at least one-third of all 
lands and other property belonged to the gods, but kings were 
forced to wrench power and lands from them. 32 The kings were 

32 Maspero. Dawn of Civilization, p. 303. 



l82 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

quite as oppressive, particularly when they would commandeer 
the entire nation to carve out and pull huge blocks of stone up 
artificial hills to build pyramid tombs for themselves in which 
their carcasses were to be saved for the next world. Then in 
the building of such vast temples as the one at Karnak the priests 
would have their innings with the poor creatures, hundreds of 
thousands of whom worked and starved to death to enable the 
ruling ecclesiasts to have fine buildings to live and serve in, to fur- 
ther deceive and rob generations unborn. In the famous papyrus 
at Turin there are caricatures of the licentious practices of the 
priests, depicting a series of adventures of an old and amorous 
priest with one of the singers of the temples of Ammon. 

The Koran is an irregular collection of scraps written on 
palm leaves and mutton bones. The original "inspirations" being 
discordant they were "expurgated and revised" by the third caliph, 
Othman. The epileptic Mohammed would have a revelation re- 
quiring him to take another wife or to write some instructions for 
his people to follow and would use any writing material handy, 
such as the shoulder bones of meep, palm leaves, etc. ; Abu-Bekr 
picked these over and put the long ones first and the short ones 
last, the only arrangement of these revelations except that of the 
third caliph's additions and omissions. These baskets of frag- 
ments are worshipped. 

The moslems assemble and select an imam who leads the 
capers. He rises and the moslems rise, he prostrates himself 
and they imitate him. While the "revelations" of the Turks and 
Mormons were mere tricks to enable the practice of polygamy, 
at least this is an open practice, other privileged livers in temples 
secured harems by imposing upon the rabble such claims as 
making "brides of heaven." This appears to have been a common 
trick in ancient Egyptian, Grecian and Roman days and it is rea- 
sonable to expect considerable survival of such customs. In many 
places in South America and Mexico open debauchery qf the 
priesthood is common and not even apologized for. Sam T. Jack, 
a showman, said that a Mexican priest offered him girls for his 
ballet, and commanded them to strip so he could judge of their 
figures. This was in 1895. 

Some sects have made use of interpretations of texts as justi- 



SUPERSTITION. 183 

fication for any sort of excess or wrong they desire to commit, 
especially "the sanctified" who say they cannot sin. "All things 
are lawful for me" 88 is one of these texts. 

The religion of the Druids among the Celts of Gaul and Brit- 
ain was cruel and included human sacrifice. Dru means oak 
grove in Gaulish. The oak and mistletoe were sacred growths 
among them. The priests pretended to be enchanters and each 
priest wore about his neck what the ignorant were told were ser- 
pents' eggs in a golden case. The religion was a mixture of the 
worship of serpents, sun, moon and gods and goddesses. 

Coifi, a chief priest of the Britains, denounced his gods as im- 
posters because they had not made his fortune and he became a 
Christian. This was a rough way of announcing that a "higher" 
call'* had been received similar to an increase in salary offered by 
another congregation. 

The priests in the early English days following Alfred, espe- 
cially in Edwy's time, resorted to mechanical tricks to deceive the 
peasants and keep knowledge from the common people, as did 
the Egyptians, Romans and Greeks. Belief in sorcery was also 
common. It is told of William the Conqueror that he placed a 
sorceress in a wooden tower and had her pushed before his troops, 
but Hereward burned tower, sorceress and all. 

The pontifices (bridge priests) of ancient Rome had flamines 
or sacrificial priests to blow the fire. The flamen was not allowed 
to take an oath, mount a horse or look at an enemy. He could 
not stay a night away from his house and his hand touched nothing 
unclean and never approached a corpse, somewhat as the Hebrew 
Kohen was exempt in some respects. This fire-blowing priest 
who had to be clean doubtless originated from priestly cooks who 
finally grew so important that a lictor preceded him to stop work 
of people, as he was not to see the business of daily life. 34 So 
powerful an order as a pagan priesthood, it appears, was as de- 
pendent upon culinary caprice as any suburban resident. 

In the days of Henry VIII teeth and toenail relics were abund- 
antly on exhibition by indolent, sensual monks. They had the 
coals that fried St. Lawrence and they moved images by wires. 

1 Cor. VI., 12-15. 
?4 Gaul and Kromei, Life of Greeks and Romans, p. 103. 



184 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

But when the people turned against these harpies of course many 
good monks had to suffer with the bad. In 1366 "Chaucer sings 
of the hunting monk and the courtly prioress with amor omnia 
vincit on her brooch, while others tell of the unrebuked vices of 
the time when the king paraded his mistress through London as 
queen of beauty and nobles blazoned their infamy in court and 
tournament." 35 

Just before Wyclif the pope and king combined for the en- 
slaving of the church, bishoprics, abbacies and livings in the gift 
of the churchmen, so that the treasuries of both king and pope 
profited by the arrangement. 36 This was in 1361. In 1377 
Wyclif's theory, seeking to make a direct relation between man 
and god, swept away the whole basis of a middle class priesthood 
on which the mediaeval church was built. The priests resented 
a suggestion that they should return to original poverty. 37 

Rufus of England made "Firebrand," Flambard, a dissolute 
and vicious rascal, bishop of Durham. Dunstan previously, after 
an infamous career of humbuggery, rapacity and cruelty, was 
canonized. The churches were often the sanctuaries of all* sorts 
of refugees, sometimes unexpectedly violated, as by the knights 
who murdered Thomas a Becket, and the black band of Henry 
III in their capture of Hubert de Burgh. 

A mediaeval ecclesiastical prerogative was what was called 
benefit of clergy which conferred on its members immunity from 
the operation of secular law. This has often been confounded 
with services of clergy, which is an entirely different thing. Ben- 
efit of clergy means that the priest might murder, steal, rape, lie, 
without punishment. Such things as the interdict and excom- 
munication derived power wholly from ignorance and supersti- 
tion of the populace. A cursed person dropping dead in church 
from fright was an occasional proof of divine power of the curser, 
about as frequently it has happened when a person was blessed 
at a church sacrament, but of course this was a mere accident. 
England was made to suffer from both excommunication and in- 
terdict when the country was altogether damned for not yielding 

35 Green, History of England, p. 298. 
38 Green, ibid. 
37 Green, ibid. 



SUPERSTITION. 1^5 

revenues to the curser, but it escaped the inquisition, which lasted 
from 1203 to 1225, in which period Torquemada alone sacrificed 
11,000 victims. The total in 43 years, from 1481 to 1525, 
amounted to 234,520. 38 

Selfish grabbing of opportunity afforded by spread of sec- 
tarian ideas is by no means confined to any particular religion. 
Francis of Waldeck in 1544 wanted to make the new religion of 
Lutheranism a family possession with himself as bishop, but mob 
frenzy moved too fast for him. In Miinster churches and 
libraries were destroyed, foolish revelations were made, prophets 
appeared with long, ragged beards. John Bockelson married six- 
teen wives and proclaimed polygamy. 

Tyler summarizes nature myths in his chapter on the early 
history of mankind 39 to the effect that everything in nature is per- 
sonified, fire is a hungry* beast licking its red tongue over its 
food, the sun and moon are personified and the moon's children 
are the stars ; animals are persons ; much superstition is from 
the childish effort to explain nature, stories grow and change. 
Cox names as aids to change polynomy the use of many names 
for the same hero, equivocations, also, where words with the 
same sounds become confused and different meanings are at- 
tached to old ideas, for instance the rays from the sun were spoken 
of as fingers in a poetical way in one language, to be taken literally 
in another language as meaning that the sun had real hands and 
fingers. Then localizing tendencies fitted old stories to new 
places, etc. 

Miiller mentions poetical metaphors such as moonlight clasp- 
ing the earth and sunbeams kissing the seas as common in the 
early history of languages. In reference to the golden rays of 
the sun playing with the foliage of the trees the Veda mentions 
Savitur, one of the names of the sun, as golden handed, and the 
mistake arises that the sun is full of gold for its worshippers, and 
bestows it on his priests and thus superstitions take root from 
childish ideas. Change in the mythology in the original Sanskrit 
occurs as to Savila cutting his hand and the priests replaced it 
with an artificial one of gold. Later Savitar is said to become 

38 J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy. 
38 Primitive Culture. 



lS6 THE EVOLUTION OE MAN AND HIS ' MIND. 

himself a priest and he cut off his own hand and the other priests 
made a golden one for him. 40 

The German god Tyr is identified by Grimm with the Sanskrit 
sun god, 41 and he is one-handed because the name of golden- 
handed sun led to the conception of the sun with one artificial 
hand and later to the idea of sun with one hand. Each nation 
invented its story as to how Savitar or Tyr lost his hand, and 
while the priests of India said he lost it at a sacrifice, the sports- 
men of the north said he placed it in the mouth of a wolf and it 
was bitten off. Radical and poetical metaphors get mixed. 

If modern poets call clouds mountains it is clearly poetical 
metaphor, but we see the Veda called the clouds parvata > knotty 
or rugged, and the result is mythology, for if in the Veda it is said 
the maruts or storms make the mountains tremble or that the 
storms pass through the mountains, this, though originally mean- 
ing that the storms make the clouds shake, comes to mean later 
that the maruts actually shook the mountains and rent them asun- 
der. 42 

Miiller further says, "I look upon the sunrise and sunset, on 
the daily return of night and day, on the battle between light and 
darkness, on the whole solar drama in all its details that is acted 
every day, every month and year in heaven and in earth as the 
principal objects in early mythology. I consider that the very idea 
of divine power sprang from the wonderment with which the 
forefathers of the Aryan family stared at the bright, deva, powers 
that came and went no one knew whence or whither, that never 
failed, never faded, never died, and were called immortal, i. e., 
unfading as compared with the feeble and decaying race of man. 
I consider the regular recurrence of phenomena an almost indis- 
pensable condition of their being raised through the charms of 
mythological phraseology to the ranks of immortals, and I give a 
proportionately small space to meteorological phenomena such as 
cloud, thunder and lightning, which, though causing commotion 
for the time in the hearts of men, would be classed as subjects or 
enemies. It is the sky that gathers the clouds, and the bright 

40 Miiller Science of Languages, V. II., p. 397. 

41 Deutsche Mythologie, XL VII, p. 187. 

42 Miiller, Sci. L., Vol. II., p. 396. 



SUPERSTITION. 187 

sun is but an irregular repetition of that more momentous strug- 
gle which takes place every day between the darkness of the night 
and the refreshing light of morning." 43 

Mohammedans do not fear death in battle, for they believe 
their reward is sure in the next world, but if their bodies are cut 
to pieces or burned they can never get to heaven, so some of their 
enemies terrify them by cremating dead Mohammedans. In Bos- 
nia at one time they fled from the country on this account. 
Ancient Assyrians took advantage of the Egyptians' reverence for 
cats by tying them to the shields of soldiers before whom the 
Egyptians stampeded, as they could not risk killing a cat. The 
Sepoys of India cared little for any punishment the English could 
inflict, and were in constant danger of another uprising until 
some captives were blown from the mouths of cannons, a mode 
of destruction that was found to completely suppress further re- 
volt, owing to the Sepoys having some superstition attached to 
separation of parts of the body. 

Survival of time-honored foolishness is beyond number. 
People may be seen slyly gathering the bubbles on their coffee, 
picking up horseshoes for luck, trying to see the new moon over 
right shoulders, hesitating about w T alking under ladders or cross- 
ing a funeral procession. Among gamblers there is a regular 
code of such observances and an allied mysticism is found to an 
extreme degree in various forms among degenerates of the "cere- 
bral neurasthenia" class who fear to do this or that thing, to go 
here or there ; some fear crowds, others open spaces, some fear 
contamination and others have morbid impulses to count every- 
thing they encounter or to make ejaculations sometimes of a filthy 
nature. 

Most superstition is ingrained from childhood, such as in a 
baby girl who was always afraid of a chicken feather, its trem- 
bling movements caused it to appear to be alive, and a primitive 
savage could have readily made the same mistake. 

Lowry, in Griffin's Collegians, turned back on meeting a red 
headed woman and lost his place because he did not perform his 
errand, delivering mail, but Lowry claimed it was the red head 
that brought him the bad luck of losing his job. 
4 " Miiller. Sci. L, Vol. II., p. 537. 



lS8 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

Much charity can be traced to a superstitious regard for a 
reward hereafter. A soldier at Santiago was assisting refugees 
and Col. Roosevelt warned him not to expose himself to so much 
danger, whereupon the soldier remarked with much surprise : 
"A man can't get hurt while doing a good deed, can he?" 

The auspiciousness of things we find still referred to, origi- 
nating in the ancient custom of the priests observing the flight 
of birds or the intestines of animals to determine whether the 
gods favored certain undertakings. The Emperor Hadrian was 
especially addicted to "auspices." The vulgar expression is trying 
to note "which way the cat jumps," and children, savages, gam- 
blers and degenerates attach importance to trifling methods of 
solving uncertainties, as the Chinese religion brings down from 
far off times similar ideas, and the Chinaman juggles with his 
■"joss sticks" for answers as to whether he shall make a certain 
venture or not. 

Benvenuto Cellini gravely records that January 5, 1537, just 
after sundown near Rome, he saw in the direction of Florence, 
toward the northwest, on the approach of a dark night, a beam of 
light which sparkled. He thought it indicated something and it 
turned out that a noted man had died that day. The aurora bore- 
alis is not common in such latitudes, but this extract from the 
famous sculptor's memoirs is characteristic of the universal mis- 
interpretation of the simplest natural events. 

Lucretius' affirmation that "Nature is seen to do all things 
spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods" is op- 
posed to-day by those who have substituted other gods for the 
ancient. Superstitions are often imperfect observations, as when 
farmers and sailors predict weather upon insufficient signs, such 
as the ground-hog appearance, etc. Astrology swayed the desti- 
nies of Europe, and a hundred years after Luther, the astrologer 
was the counsellor of princes and generals. Now the very rudi- 
ments of astrology are lost and forgotten except among fortune 
tellers and other fakirs. The average psychical research society is 
composed of persons with little logical training and unfamiliar 
with physics, chemistry and biology, but occasionally one who 
may be versed in one of these subjects exhibits all the cred- 
ulity and bias of the others. The average fraud who is being 



SUPERSTITION. 189 

examined by such societies presents his fake in such ways as could 
be compared with requiring the watch repairer to study the de- 
ranged mechanism of a watch by examining the works through 
a key hole, the cabinets and darkened room and other bambooz- 
ling tricks are gravely investigated and finally some medium 
makes the revelation that there is nothing mysterious about it all 
except in the minds of the victims. Mrs. Piper of Boston, in 
October, 1901, announced that her mysterious trance states in 
which so many "distinguished persons" found evidences of super- 
naturalism, etc., are nothing extraordinary, and that she does not 
claim to hold communication with the so-called spirit world. She 
explains that her revelations were nothing more than what could 
have naturally occurred to her mind or been suggested by some 
one present. In her simplicity she talks about mind reading, or 
telepathy, and likens it to the X-ray and wireless telegraphy, much 
as the Indian shows you your soul in the looking glass, and claims 
that all things are possible when water boils without heat, as 
shown by the Seidlitz powder. As Huxley says, "Jack an d the 
Bean Stalk'' can be proven true by such reasoning as these "in- 
vestigators" use. Keeley's motor, the great humbug, was firmly 
believed in by stockholders in it, and by occasional scientists. 
Ghosts, spirits, fairies, pixies, the "little people" and the "good 
people" of Ireland and many other countries are survivals from 
hoary old times with a basis of forest-dwelling monkeys and 
dwarfs or pigmies mingled with hallucinations, delusions and de- 
ception. Crystal gazing, palmistry, astrology, hypnotism, animal 
magnetism, and other occultism is "proved" by calling attention 
to the fact that competent surgeons doubted the possibility of the 
X-ray when it was first announced. Such an argument would 
bolster up the wildest drivel of pre-Aryan ape imaginations as 
true. There are competent persons to-day who do not believe the 
moon is made of green cheese, therefore this occult fact will be- 
come established according to occult reasoning because it was 
not believed in. This alleged ability to read minds at a distance, 
telepathy, Preyer regards as involving fraud, coincidence, hallu- 
cinations, incorrect reporting, lack of accurate observation and 
similar means of imposing upon self or others. As to the crystal 



I9O THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

gazing of Lang, many lunatics in asylums "see things" without 
the aid of a crystal. 

Many peculiar events can be accounted for naturally, for ex- 
ample a lady lost a promissory note for which she hunted in vain 
until finally its location came to her in a dream ; this is nothing 
more than a revived memory equivalent to things occurring to 
the mind when ceased to be sought for. A drunkard hid his 
money and while sober could not find it but readily went to the 
hiding place when drunk again. 

A lady was being confirmed in a church when an earthquake 
occurred; she told a physician who was also in church that she 
thought the noise was the coming of the holy ghost, the doctor 
remarked that he thought it was the coming of the steeple; in- 
stances of the receptivity of ideas from untrained and trained 
directions. Many are the paranoiacs and dements in asylums 
who not only claim to be gods but impose their belief upon the 
patients. 

A poem addressed to a scientist by a literary gentleman de- 
plored the inability of the delver in nature to see God in all such 
matters. Pope's lines, 'Xo, the poor Indian," etc., were appended 
to the verses by the naturalist, by way of reply. 

The English high church covets the millinery, perfumery and 
gymnastics of its older relation. At Dover in 1901, Easter, a 
curate refused to confirm boys who refused to confess, and this 
suggests that ceremonies enable a hold on the imagination and 
purses of the people. By increase of concessions such as sacra- 
ments, abstinences, feast and fast days, oversight, control and rev- 
erence are increased together, whereby the pennies of the multi- 
tude go to make the wealth of a few. 

The ancient patesis or king-priest has an imitator in Kaiser 
Wilhelm II, who sermonizes and poses in other ways. Illinois 
had a demagogue spoils system governor who often occupied 
pulpits on Sundays while filling responsible public charity posi- 
tions with incompetent officials whose ignorance was murderous. 

Wilhelm addressed the nobles of East Prussia September 6, 
1894, claiming "divine right" to kingship, and at Hamburg in 
1899 and elsewhere he 'repeated this claim. Prince Henry in 1897 
gave vent to this outburst when addressing his royal brother : 



SUPERSTITION. 191 

"I am only animated by one desire, to proclaim and preach abroad 
to all who will hear, as well as those who will not, the gospel of 
your Majesty's anointed person. * * * Our most serene, 
mighty, beloved Emperor, King and master, forever and ever. 
Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah. Huxley thinks that eventually royalty 
will be laughed out of existence. Seemingly the time has not yet 
come. 

Eddyism advocates that its prayers have a "knack" and the 
correct combination with the door to the deity is in exclusive 
possession of the Eddyites, that he will only listen to and grant 
the prayers coming from that official source, when paid for at reg- 
ular rates ; your individual prayers cannot avail, you must belong 
to the "Union," and "rat" praying is discouraged by the trust. 
The official prayer alone is effective. Similarly a Missouri con- 
fessed fakir named Weltman advertised to cure every one at a 
dollar a prayer, and so did a miscreant who called himself "Dr. 
Truth" in Boston. The postoffices authorities seized their mail 
for carrying on confidence games with the public and the amounts 
of money sent these transparent humbugs was incredible. 

Mental impressions do benefit some sick people, but because 
we may find an occasional apple in the gutter that is not the 
proper place to seek for apples, however much the public may 
appear to think so. I have known extreme unction to greatly help, 
and, on rare occasions to restore apparently dying persons, at 
least their worry both as to bodily and spiritual matters was al- 
layed by this last sacrament, and as surely as worry may kill, so 
their release from it helped to their recovery. 

Among the countless new sects that arise are such sinless affairs 
as the new "holiness." A Methodist solicitor of building funds 
established a church of this nature, and the sanctified are notori- 
ously the most arrogant and cruel hypocrites. Their sins are not 
sins. Royalty similarly cannot sin, and priests also are sinless. 

An abominable old superstition may outlive its profitableness 
to its cultivators, but the people may go on perpetuating it though 
its occasion has passed away, just as we have remnants of druidi- 
cal festivals and customs retained among us and ancient Baby- 
lonian and Jewish ceremonies and priestly apparel, with also some 
of the Mithras of the Persians and Apollo sun worship, remain 



9 2 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 



with us. The very name Sunday for the holy day is an instance. 
Nations cling to old customs even when their religion is changed, 
but it is only when a band of persons intelligent and powerful 
enough see profit in some radical change that it can be accom- 
plished by leading or forcing the people to make the change, easier 
still if the times are ripe for it. The absence of biological educa- 
tion among people leaves them a prey to humbuggery. Science 
would negative all untruth and rescue the masses from the horri- 
ble ignorance that blinds them. It was a difficult task as an ex- 
ample of this condition, to educate a patient out of the notion that 
a mind reader was injuring her by keeping his mind intent upon 
her when miles away. By instructing her that the claim was fool- 
ish and that it was her own ignorance that distressed her she 
finally recovered and defied the mind reader, who was trying to 
defraud her of some property. 

The ancient Phallic worship, from which it is said obelisks 
and steeples date, was in many respects an idealization of the 
origin of life, worship of the pater omnium vivum. It remains 
for our modern days to unearth some new abominations as dis- 
closed in the trial of Diss De Bar in London, October, 1901, 
charged with defrauding by fortune telling. She established a 
sect called theocratic unity, claimed the attributes of divine power, 
and induced girls to misconduct themselves under the belief that 
it was a necessary part of their religious devotion, under vows 
of secrecy and belief in Diss De Bar as a deity. She and another 
criminal had previously engaged in many varieties of confidence 
games in America. "Sex Worship," by Clifford Howard, is an 
exposition of the Phallic origin of religion, published in 1897. In 
it he claims that aphrodisian cults were probably both innocent 
and beneficial at the times and places of their origin. 

Very much as dialects may become languages, or tribes swell 
into nations, so any silly superstitious fake is liable to unexpect- 
edly grow into a full religion like that of Shakerism, or Eddyism, 
or Dowieism, while others, like Teedism and Swedenborgianism, 
die sooner or later, as, in fact, many now successful religions of 
today also will, save those which through natural selection have 
come to stay, as the sturgeon represents a very early form of fish 
whose descendants may see the end of this planet, and as Macaulay 



SITEKSTITION. I93 

predicted, would be the case witb the Roman Catholic religion, 

when the New Zealand traveler visits the ruins of London in far 

off ages. 

Very much of the primitive construction of mythology can be 

seen in the action of children who start out with the idea of there 
being a Santa Claus or St. Nicholas. They dictate long lists of 
articles they want him to bring them, showing the insatiable greed 
of the little folks like that of their savage progenitors. They are 
anxious to propitiate him by promising to be good and tidy and 
to learn lessons, etc., but they act as though he could be fooled 
just as their parents may sometimes think they can juggle with 
the almighty. The little folks grow quite imaginative and give 
accurate descriptions of all sorts of things done by Santa Claus 
and are capable of narrating interviews w r ith him. When chil- 
dren are finally told that it is a deception they sorrow over it as 
though a dear friend had been lost, as one whose religion has been 
assailed or destroyed. This reverence of a gift-giving saint is an 
advance upon the fear of a hateful, revengeful spirit and is later 
a step in superstition. But even in civilized communities we find 
a great mixture of god and devil worship in the fear of a revenge- 
ful and loving deity. 

That superstition, belief, religion, or philosophy, call it what 
you will, that accords with the inclinations and comprehension 
of a people, or can be impressed upon them, is the one that sur- 
vives. Hence the belief merely exhibits the capacity of the peo- 
ple and its acceptance is no measure of the truth of the belief. 

There is a remarkable similarity in the religions of mankind. 
Oppenheim 44 says the Hindoo Chrishna, the Persian Mithras, 
the Egyptian Osiris, the sun gods, Hercules, Dionysus and others, 
were all called saviors and worshipped as such. They had much 
the same history. They were born on the 25th of December, the 
day when the sun was supposed to be the farthest south, they all 
had virgin mothers, and the Scandinavian Frigga, the Buddhist 
Maya-Maya, the Egyptian Isis, the Hindoo Devaki, the Greek 
Semale are identical; they had strikingly similar life histories, 
they performed much the same miracles, the number of their dis- 
ciples was curiously often alike, they were persecuted, slain and 

44 The Development of the Child, p. 122. 



1 9 4 



THE EVOLUTION OE MAN AND HIS MIND. 



arose from the dead to ascend into heaven. A triune god was 
worshipped all the way from the rugged land of the Scandinavi- 
ans to the fertile banks of the Egyptian Nile. The Egyptians in- 
troduced public festivals, processions and solemn supplications, 
and the Greeks learned from them, says Herodotus. Isis as part 
of the trinity, though with another name, standing in a crescent 
moon, was a common image and her effigy with the infant Horus 
in her arms has come down to us as the Madonna and child. The 
Ephesians forsook their Diana, "the mother of God," for the Mr- 
gin, and when Cyrle and his council decreed that the ancient title 
was conferred on the Virgin the Ephesians wept for joy. 

Man is in a certain phase of his being religious, he seeks a 
higher power for praise or blame, for punishment and reward, 
and according to his intelligence is credulous or skeptical of the 
claims of those who announce themselves as knowing all about 
God. The weaker in mind are most prone to seek religious con- 
solation whether imbecile or dying and the undeveloped emo- 
tional female mind is notoriously the one easiest imposed upon. 
The child is most receptive of the ancient accounts of miracles. 
His inability to understand properly is taken advantage of and he 
has to escape later from belief in the fables he has been taught. 
He accepts the creeds forced on him, but is unable to assimilate 
the reasoning by which these creeds are upset, and the unrea- 
soning adult often sees nothing absurd in a creed which consigns 
infants to hell or the monkey gravity with which a later conven- 
tion of sanctified apes concludes that this part of the creed needs 
revising. This absurdity of occasional revision of creeds that are 
worn out until sometimes there is nothing left of the creed, or it 
is merely ignored, occurs when the old belief is inconvenient and 
a new one must be arranged. But these creeds, whether they 
are mended or not, are tacitly accepted, just as oaths in secret 
societies are taken without previous inquiry into their nature. 

S. L. Clemens 45 describes the harsh measure used by the Chris- 
tian missionaries in China, after the massacres of missionaries and 
the allied powers' retaliation, indemnifying themselves one and 
one-third times by forced means, and suggests a commandment : 
"Thou shalt not steal except when it is the custom of the coun- 

45 North American Review, April, 1901. 



SUPERSTITION. 1 95 

try." Adopting the custom of the Chinese, revenge instead of 
Christian forgiveness is "spreading the gospel." He concluded 
that those missionaries are sincere, self-sacrificing, warm-hearted, 
all heart in fact, but often with little head; their judgment is 
awry. To enable the religion of non-aggression to be taught the 
missionaries resorted to Chinese methods of aggression. The 
fact is "business" methods rule such organizations and the mis- 
sionaries merely submit to higher orders. 

But the world moves, and some parts faster than others, and 
progress continues notwithstanding the clogs and impediments 
of superstition and the grab instinct that takes advantage of it. 
It would be foolish to assert that all religions and all religious in- 
stitutions and priests are bad. Such is far from being the case, 
but any institution may be changed, subverted, corrupted, and so 
may the persons connected with it. Some movements are bad 
from their very start, others are intended to be only good and 
may finally be corrupted. A vast range of "belief" and cere- 
mony may exist in the same denomination at distances apart, pre- 
cisely as dialects may separate original languages. The Ameri- 
can churches differ greatly from the European owing to public 
schools and free institutions unfitting Americans for slavery 
of intellect. Under Spanish rule the Philippine friars could be 
oppressive, but intelligent American Catholics made such repre- 
sentations to Rome that the pope was compelled to move these 
autocratic monks to Venezuela and Ecuador. 

The "Truce of God" began in A. D. 1034, necessitated by the 
fierce incessant private and public wars everywhere in Europe. 
Ecclesiastical influence induced the people to abstain from fight- 
ing at least on holy days, and so in this instance superstition ex- 
erted a power for good. The monasteries of the middle ages were 
refuges for learning and enabled students to escape from strife, 
though this was incidental among communities endeavoring to 
obtain a living without work. 

The crusaders visiting Rome saw that personal interest had 
very much to do with religious control and in additon to this Mus- 
selmans and Christians grew, better acquainted with one another 
and found that interested parties had lied to them concerning 
foreigners and so they ceased to regard each other as wholly bar- 



196 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

barian. In spite of the bible teaching that the poor are to be es- 
pecially considered the churches have largely fostered the idea 
that "God made the rich and the devil the poor." Not by words 
but by acts. The feeling is very prevalent among the poor that 
they are not wanted in a church as they are unsightly and can 
contribute nothing to the expenses. And even an occasional Aztec 
descendant thinks of such things as inconsistencies. One ra- 
marked that after all he did not think much of his sun god for he 
could only go one way while men go anywhere they please. 

When superstition is overworked people become accustomed 
to be cursed and the anathemas cease to be effective. Prince 
Louis of France did not hesitate to agree to take the English 
crown though excommunication would result, caring as little for 
this as his father cared for the pope's forgiveness of his sins, and 
interdicts lose force also in time if too often used. People in 
King John's day observed that the sky did not fall because the 
pope was angry, and finally defied him. The expectation that 
Biela's comet would destroy the earth in 1832 was taken advan- 
tage of to terrify the people of Paris, who bought seats in para- 
dise from the priests at very high prices. After a battle in South 
America the bodies of the soldiers were found with instructions 
to St. Peter to admit the bearer to heaven as he had paid for the 
privilege to the priest who signed the pass. 

Reformers have often sprung from within an institution and 
have successfully spread. Pelagianism of the fifth century was 
started by the monk Pelagius, who brought up the matter of free 
will in the relation of the divine control, provoking a great intel- 
lectual discussion. In the eleventh century a young Milan priest 
named Patereues denounced the corruption of the clergy and 
brought about an uprising. The Hyksos rulers of Egypt were 
monotheists and despised the polytheism and idol worship of their 
predecessors. In B. C. 2754 they destroyed the temples but in B. 
C. 1700 the temples were restored, showing that a thousand years' 
release from manifestations of superstition will not kill it off as 
an inherent human possession. As long as man exists he will be 
more or less superstitious and the masses will be more so than 
less so. 

Notwithstanding the religious contention in England in which 



SUPERSTITION. 197 

first one sect was slaughtered and then another in civil strife, at 
last when Spain threatened England under a religious pretext the 
English Catholics proved their loyalty in every way. Spain again 
pra^e'd in 1898 about religion justifying all that country did, but 
only one priest in the entire United States asserted publicly that 
American Catholics should join with Spain, and he was promptly 
suppressed by his own American co-religionists. Thus there ap- 
pears a relativity of religious bigotry. Under Elizabeth patriot- 
ism triumphed over superstition. The English of different sects 
were more to one another than strange bloodthirsty Spaniards 
could be to English Catholics. And in the very nest of popery the 
Italians prefer that church and state should be separate, and 
surely the world has moved indeed when Rome shackles its em- 
peror and recognizes him only as a priest. Thus separating the 
priest-king function that came down from the patesis of Baby- 
lon. 

The Eleusinian mysteries among the ancient Greeks were a 
source of faith and hope to the initiated, as are the churches of 
modern times. Secret holy doctrines were aroused amid solemn 
imposing rites with promises of blessing to the sincere and those 
with pious trust. The origin is in a mythical antiquity and the 
priesthood was hereditary. Isocrates said, "Those initiated have 
sweeter hope of eternal life." In moments of great peril con- 
verts asked, "Are you initiated ?" as though having been so were 
preparation for another life. The Goths under Alaric in 395 de- 
stroyed the temples at Eleusis in their devastation of Greece and 
the rites ceased. In this we have a probable instance of morality, 
kindness and some doctrine of eternal life preceding the Chris- 
tians, and not associated with other religions. But it does not 
require this testimony alone to show that the multitude of reli- 
gions were not connected with the best emotions of the human 
heart, and that here and there may have been isolated philosophies 
of nature, but it was not until comparatively recent days that the 
attempt was made to make religion moral. It was natural that 
whatever was found to be for the good of the race should be 
formulated by some thinker or philosopher, and in time it would 
become a religion, or be appended to some existing superstition 
by way of reform or compromise. 



ICjS THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

The Sandemonians were a small sect founded by a Scotchman 
at the time of the American revolution. It was taught by them 
that "an intellectual belief would insure salvation without faith 
and that this belief would insure Christian virtues." 

When Alexander issued his letters, orders and decrees styling 
himself King Alexander, the son of Jupiter Ammon, they came 
to the inhabitants of Egypt with an authority that can now hardly 
be realized. The free-thinking Greeks, however, put on such a 
supernatural pedigree its proper value. Olympias, who, of course 
better than all others knew the facts of the case, used to jestingly 
say that she wished Alexander would cease from incessantly em- 
broiling her with Jupiter's wife. Arrian, the historian of the 
Macedonian expedition, observes, "I cannot condemn him for en- 
deavoring to draw his subjects into the belief of his divine origin, 
nor can I be induced to think it any great crime, for it is very rea- 
sonable to imagine that he intended no more by it than merely to 
procure the greater authority among his soldiers." 46 . The Mace- 
donian rulers of Egypt prostituted the religious sentiments of 
their time to statecraft, finding in it a means of governing their 
lower classes. To the intelligent they gave philosophy. Con- 
stantine found public sentiment largely leaning toward Christian- 
ity and when Diocletian abdicated, A. D. 305, saw the advantage 
of heading the movement. Place, power, profit, were in view of 
whoever joined the conquering sect. Crowds of worldly per- 
sons who cared nothing about its religious ideas became its warm- 
est supporters. Pagans at heart, their influence was soon mani- 
fested in the paganization of Christianity that forthwith ensued. 
But the emperor did not conform to the ceremonial requirements 
of the church until the close of his evil life, A. D. 337. 

There are sincere workers in all religions, but seldom do we 
find the broad minded, generous, thoughtful bishop such as Man- 
zoni mentioned, 47 who did all he could to lessen the plague which 
the ignorance of his people fed, and his priests could not fathom 
the bishop's intentions or ideas, so much lower in intelligence 
were they. But in most cases the higher official is a shrewd self- 
seeker, and sincerity exists among the humble who refuses to use 

46 Draper, Conflict of Religion and Science, p. 8. 
* T I Promessi Sposi. 



SUPERSTITION. 199 

any effort at intrigue to advance himself above his fellows. The 
well-fed, rosy, wine-drinking, sleek-clad, finely housed and at- 
tended rulers are, so far as character is concerned, the least worthy 
of the organization, while the humble missionary on a starvation 
salary is often the one who redeems an otherwise corrupt body 
of men. 

Such men as De Smet and Xavier risked their lives for what 
they sincerely thought to be the best interests of their fellow men, 
while others high in the command over them, with lives barren of 
any good deed, would point to these self-sacrificing ones and say, 
"See what good we do!" 

It does not follow, either, that mere lowness of station guar- 
antees humility of heart, goodness or even ordinary kindness. 
I knew a priest who came to the county insane asylum to visit 
the attendants ; he arrived at the asylum only upon paydays, and 
on one occasion he was catechizing a demented woman and hold- 
ing his missal over his head he commanded her to answer or 
he would strike her with the book. The vast range of intelli- 
gence and kindness between a Xavier and such a priest need 
scarcely be hinted. 

O. W. Holmes notes the change during the past century in 
men's opinions concerning their beliefs. "Since then protestant- 
ism is more respectful in its treatment of Romanism, orthodoxy 
in its treatment of heterodoxy, Christianity in its handling of 
humanity. The limitations of men are better realized, the impos- 
sibility of their thinking alike, the virtue of humility is found to 
include many things which have often been considered outside 
its province, among others the conviction of the infallibility of our 
special convictions in matters of belief which appeal differently to 
different minds." 

"How can we seek a single faith to find, 
When one in every score is color blind ; 
If here on earth they can't tell red from green, 
Can they see better into things unseen?" 

As an indication of this attempt of discordant religions to be- 
come reconciled, Lyman Beecher wrote a book entitled "Ten Great 
Religions," in which there was a ludicrous but sincere endeavor 



200 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

to boil down heterogeneous ''beliefs" and contradictions of dom- 
inant faiths; the neglected million or so of other superstitions 
should have been at least referred to. The only possible recon- 
ciliation is on the basis of psychology as outgrowths of fear and 
rapacity, and later the better emotions influencing the old savage 
conceptions of deity. 

There may be good to multitudes in religion, but it must not 
be forgotten that it affords opportunity to the scamp who seldom 
fails to take advantage of it. In Mohammedanism, Eddyism, 
Dowieism, Mormonism, we see the money pour into the sanctuary 
from the simple-minded, good, honest, sincere, gullable mob who 
would not be, ordinarily, bad as long as it can find an excuse to 
be good, unless directed to a St. Bartholomew or Mountain Mead- 
ow massacre by their priests. 

Agnosticism is expanding because from the ranks of intellec- 
tual thinkers whose conduct is guided by justice and morality it 
will descend tc the iawless upon whose wicked impulses some re- 
straint is now placed by the fear of future punishment, but how 
far this belief does restrain them is quite questionable, more than 
likely those who accept such ideas would not do wrong anyway, 
and we positively know that multitudes who profess the most 
orthodox religion, including fear of devils and hellfire, are in no 
wise made better or deterred from evil deeds. Even brigands have 
their father confessors and churches. 

Huxley leaves his mind a scientific blank on questions of lunar 
politics and resents the claim of any one to the right to label him 
as believing in this, that or the other matter. The agnostic does 
not find it necessary to have an opinion on every subject. It is 
the ignorant who always has one and asserts it with confidence. 
Science shows that man made god after his owm image, anthropo- 
morphism, and then claimed the reverse. 

Among early attempts at emancipation from traditional drill- 
ing and training of children so they could grow up into servile 
instruments to the greed and inconsideration of power in church 
and state, about 1360 the "Brethren of the Common Lot" was 
founded in Europe and in the Netherlands started the first public 
schools. 48 

45 W. E. Griffis, The Influence of the Netherlands, p. 3. 



SUPERSTITION. 201 

The fable or story was nearly the only means of public instruc- 
tion of ancient people and today the romance and drama are 
powerful means of reaching the masses, who could not be induced 
to learn important matters otherwise. Much quickening of sym- 
pathy and moral training is obtained through well-acted plays, 
particularly such as Shakespeare's, and it is worth considering if 
more humanitarian ideas do not filter to the common people 
through that source than from any other. The theater in Japan 
as elsewhere is the outgrowth of religious rites and its evolution 
may be said to have been from empty superstitious ceremony, sol- 
emn nonsense, to entertainment and incidentally teaching up- 
rightness and other things that make people better citizens. 

When the illusions vanish and delusions are destroyed, when 
the devout finds his idols made of clay and religions hugged 
through life come to be abandoned, the heart grows sick and 
yearns for something else to fasten upon, and often the cry goes 
up "What use is it to disturb beliefs ?" particularly such as afford 
comfort to the believer ? Well, if this comfort is like that derived 
from opium or whisky, if you are in a false paradise and asleep to 
danger, if your mind is deadened to actualities "Cui bono ?" may 
be answered that you are given the truth, you are freed from your 
superstitions, your ghosts, terrors, hobgoblins. But the African 
in his wild state is not prepared to give up his idols for intangible 
civilized ideas. The mind must evolve, adjust to such changes 
slowly. 

In his "Essay on Beauty," Ralph Waldo Emerson says : 
"Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. In- 
stead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt 
the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and 
traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its 
large relations, that climate, century, remote natures as well as 
near are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces but it 
does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute our ele- 
ments into another, to prolong life, to arm with power — that was 
in the right direction. All our sciences lack a human side. The 
tenant is more than the house. Bugs, and stamens, and spores on 
which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when 
his powers unfold in order, will take nature along with him and 



202 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us 
more than the peering into microscopes, and is larger than can 
be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer." 

Had Emerson's broad intellect been engaged in scientific direc- 
tions he would have been heartily ashamed of having written such 
stuff. Herbert Spencer writes that science opens up new beau- 
ties in the universe to which the uninstructed are blind. Hugh 
Miller, Herschel, Faraday, Tyndall, Huxley could have made 
Emerson's heart leap for joy at their revelations, and his writings 
would have been enhanced in their power for good. 

The very reverse of Emerson's idea is true. 

Astrology and alchemy with other "philosophies" of the days 
of sorcery, the black art by which one creature hoped to be able 
to take foul advantage of another, were emanations of the 'night 
of time, when burnings at the stake were frequent alike for think- 
ers and witches. The horoscope is still cast by Indian fakirs, and 
astrology thrives amidst appropriate surroundings. And doubt- 
less Emerson would have opened his eyes in surprise if asked 
whether he preferred to live in the land of jungles and the suttee 
rather than among spectacles and baked beans. 

Looking back over the evolution of the sciences, it is plain 
that in astrology and alchemy, it was not the love of science that 
actuated these studies; the object primarily was puerile. The 
philosopher's stone, which would transmute all metals into gold; 
the elixir vitse, which was to confer everlasting youth, were the 
absurd things sought for, and so in the search, expeditions 
throughout the world were actuated by greed and love of power. 
The march of Coronado hunting for the seven golden cities, Ponce 
de Leon's childish rambles through Florida looking for the foun- 
tain of youth, are instances in point. 

It is quite probable that among the ancient Roman, Greek, 
and Egyptian priests many physical laws were understood, but 
the only use they made of them was to deceive the people and 
enrich themselves. Among the vast multitude of today such a 
thing as cultivating a science for its own sake or to benefit the pub- 
lic would seem absurd, and so the medical student of lesser cali- 
bre would complain upon being compelled to learn chemistry and 



SUPERSTITION. 203 

botany, and especially bacteriology, when in many instances all 
these bear directly upon general medicine. 

Chemistry sprang from alchemy, and astronomy from astrol- 
ogy. At first the facts that were discovered could not be used 
and so they were mainly regarded as curiosities. Eventually these 
neglected discoveries were found to be of great use. Had it been 
possible for the childish ancient philosophers to have developed 
the sciences to their present status, most of them would have cer- 
tainly made selfish and oppressive uses of their knowledge. As 
knowledge is slow of growth, so it broadens the intellect of its 
votaries, making them more merciful and considerate, particularly 
nowadays when scientific fakirism is not so possible as in olden 
times ; and so it would seem that as fast as the world deserves 
the comforts afforded by science it receives them, and no faster. 

Probably even in the future if the elixir vitse were compounded 
and immortality were thus placed in the grasp of everyone, no one 
would be so foolish as to use it, for all would realize that perpetual 
life would be perpetual suffering. 

Franklin was asked once, what was the good of the discovery 
of the galvanic spark. He asked, "What is the good of a baby ?" 
That baby has since grown to giant size. The vast accumulation 
of scientific facts by which the world is today beautified and made- 
more comfortable have been piled up amid sneers and opposition. 
The olden searcher for knowledge wanted to make a short cut to 
power over his fellow men ; the student of today learns to spread 
his knowledge as a means of helping himself through helping 
others. So as intellects broaden, men find that by all working for 
the common good, the individual good would be best conserved. 

Imagine Xero or Cleopatra with all our present scientific 
knowledge and resources at command, would they not have made 
the earth a pitiable planet ? But this knowledge cannot be owned 
by any single mind, and hence working in unison for the com- 
mon good is the result of the existence of that knowledge. 

As science gradually inculcated altruism, perforce, the geolo- 
gist idea would be that as fast as the world deserved good things 
it received them, but the more rational view would be that the 
comforts and conveniences of the peaceful arts and sciences were 
the product of mental broadening, and that egoism developed into 



204 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

an altruism through selfish realization that individual interests are 
best secured through individuals seeking the general good. 

The Emersonian idea of "seeing good in everything," rather 
persistently sees good where it does not exist, and fails to recog- 
nize it elsewhere. It is well not to be unjustly captions but to 
deliberately blind yourself to the superabounding rascality and 
designs of hypocrites is to do wrong to the lambs by cultivating 
the wolves and to long for a return of such childish arts as as- 
trology is about as sensible as regretting that we have modern 
bath tubs, steamships and telegraphs. Why not sigh for the times 
when we had only the "skins of animals to cover us and huddled 
together in trees because we did not know enough to kindle fires ? 
The multitudes consist of mere simple savages appareled in civil- 
ized garb, enjoying what the few thinkers of the past have offered 
them. Take from Emerson what the real arts and sciences gave 
him and he would have only a horoscope marked on a palm leaf 
and a few vermin to divide his attention. 

Socrates died a martyr to intellectual lmerty, Erasmus fought 
priestly intolerance, Giordano Bruno was a martyr to rights of 
conscience, the founders of the Dutch Republic achieved both 
liberty and toleration, Cromwell befriended the persecuted Jews, 
Voltaire did much for the spirit of toleration. Thomas Paine, 
Jefferson and Madison established the American government on 
the basis of religious freedom. During the nineteenth century the 
idea of liberty of conscience grew. Bonnet-Maury 49 remarks that 
"The most despotic governments are tolerant toward the subjects 
who are too numerous or too useful to be killed or exiled." The 
area of toleration is widening. By the treaty of Westphalia in 
1648 religious equality was granted to the catholic and protestant 
churches though consistently condemned by the papacy. Bismarck 
struggled long with the pope in vain. In self defense Germany 
was compelled to drive out the Jesuits in 1872, a political, not a 
religious, measure. 

Religious progress began in Austria in 1848 and by the law 
of 1868 liberty was extended to certain churches recognized by 
the government. 

The Waldenses were emancipated in Italy in 1848 and the 

49 History of Liberty of Conscience. 



SUPERSTITION. 



205 



free exercise of worship was guaranteed. Since 1870 free Italian 
churches have increased and even in bigoted old Spain a feeble 
religious liberty struggled up in 1869, at least the heathen there 
may worship in private houses. Switzerland comes next to Amer- 
ica in religious freedom. Bonnet-Maury thinks that since the 
edict of tolerance of Louis XVI. respect for liberty of conscience 
has grown. 

England, Holland and Scandinavia are free in matters of wor- 
ship even where churches are state institutions, and by the treaty 
of Berlin in 1878 Turkey was forced to tolerate other religions 
than its own among foreigners, but it revenges itself on helpless 
Armenians. 

The English act of toleration of 1689 led up to establishing 
rights of conscience, and finally Jews, unitarians and catholics 
were included, in the nineteenth century, until the British domin- 
ions with America represent the most abounding freedom to think 
as you please in superstitious or religious matters so long as you 
do not burn witches or compel others to adopt your ideas on these 
subjects. An old definition of liberty was "to be able to do as you 
please and compel others to do the same," and that is about the 
idea many would have of religious freedom. Disestablishment 
of the English church will be the next great step to getting bar- 
nacles off the neck of. Britons. 

China, Mexico and South America have fallen into modern 
lines as to toleration. In the United States the Jews have not 
only been free but treated with a fairness never before equaled. 
James Grant Allen 50 says Christians threw live snakes into as- 
semblies of other Christians of whom they disapproved. Bigotry 
or the worship of one's own opinion is giving way to charity. 
Pulpits even are occasionally exchanged by representatives of 
various denominations. In such and other matters Professor 
Barrows of Oberlin thinks that America has set an example that 
will be universally followed. 

The thoughts of the unlearned common people are determined 
by perfectly natural laws, they incline to awe, to be afraid of the 
unknown, and to hand down from a still more unlearned past all 
sorts of goblin and fearful stories, about such as the vulgar nurse 

r " Reign of Law. 



206 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

tries to frighten children with. The average unscrupulous man 
with a little higher intelligence, with no better idea than that the 
world owes him a living finds these mental attitudes already at 
hand and takes advantage of them to control the crowd through 
such ideas, as demagogue or hypocrite. Though the frequent 
sincerity of many priests and politicians cannot be doubted. 

In the multiplicity of religions there is more safety for the 
people. Where a single religion is dominant, as in Russia, the 
people are degraded into animals by the priesthood, who, as 
Tolstoy says, openly violate every tenet of Christianity, while 
pretending to teach it. So when sect after sect splits off from old 
beliefs it is the disintegration of and dissent from established 
superstition, leading finally to liberty of opinion, and escape from 
old methods of enslaving the mind ; a weaker master is chosen 
and finally there is emancipation. 

Between the extremes of denunciation of all religion and 
slavish submission to a belief there is a safe middle ground, there 
is the devout sincere mother who accepts religious teaching un- 
questioningly and imagines that her goodness is wholly due to 
her religion, when without religion she would have been every 
particle as good, and have cared for her children just as anxiously, 
and taught them just as carefully. 

Nor are the ministers, priests, and others who live at the 
altar hypocrites, by any manner of means. Some of the greatest 
and most sincere intellects have been in all religions, usually the , 
best being in the humbler ranks. Many have died for their beliefs 
proving their sincerity, but not proving that their beliefs were 
therefore true. 

When the ceremonies, the appeals to the senses and emotions, 
are things of the past, when the massive churches, closed six days 
in the week, are converted to the uses of the poverty-stricken and 
other sufferers, when "the church of this world" develops as a 
means of helping humanity upward and onward, then religion 
will have passed from the forest of monkeydom to the broad plain 
of upright intellectual sympathetic manhood. 

If the highest religion becomes that of working unselfishly 
for other individuals and the race, impelled thereto by promptings 
that have become innate, emotional and intellectual, you may say 



SUPERSTITION. 207 

intellcctualizccl and spontaneous, then Voltaire, who sought the 
good of his fellows without earing to gain even the credit for it, 
whose most charitable work was done anonymously so that it 
might be the most effective, and not be complicated with men- 
tion of his name which always produced vindictive, lying ani- 
mosity, will be regarded as among those who possessed this high- 
est type of religion, and whose happiness in his work was recog- 
nized in his being called "the laughing philosopher." 

But it must not be forgotten that while mankind is mentally 
equipped as we find him, some kind of religion is necessary for 
him to induce him to behave himself, until he advances intellec- 
tually to the point where he can do right from choice and not 
through fear. 



CHAPTER VIII. 
LANGUAGE. 

Darwin 1 says : "Quadrupeds use their voices for various pur- 
poses as a signal of danger, as a call from one member of a troop 
to another, or from the mother to her lost offspring, or from the 
latter for protection to their mothers." Darwin notes the differ- 
ences between the voices of the two sexes, as the lion and the 
lioness, bull and cow. "Almost all male animals use their voices 
much more during the rutting season than at any other time, and 
some as the giraffe and porcupine are said to be completely mute 
except at this season." Old stags bellow at the breeding season 
and before their battles, but are silent during the battle. Many 
animal's use their voices under strong emotions as when enraged 
and preparing to fight, just as a man grinds his teeth and clenches 
his hands in rage or agony. Stags challenge each other by bel- 
lowing. The lion terrorizes with his voice and erects his mane to 
appear formidable." The jealousy and rage, continued during 
many generations, may at least have produced an inherited effect 
on the vocal organs of the stag as well as other male animals." 

The male gorilla has a tremendous voice and the gibbons rank 
among the noisiest of monkeys, calling to each other as the beav- 
ers and other quadrupeds do. Hylobates agilis emits a correct 
octave of musical notes according to C. L. Martin 2 . 

Many birds have organs for singing but do not sing and so 
apes may have organs for speech and not use them because not 
trained or for other reason. 

Darwin 3 says : "The diversity of the sounds, both vocal and 
instrumental made by the males of many species during the breed- 
ing season, and the diversity of means for producing such sounds 

descent of Man, Ch. XVIII, Vol. II. 

2 Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch. XVIII, Vol. II. 

3 Darwin, Op. Cit, Ch. XIII, Vol. III. 

208 



LANGUAGE. 209 

is highly remarkable," somewhat as insects are provided. The 
bird using its voice as a mere call could have, step by step, im- 
proved it into melodious love song. "It is curious that in some 
classes of animals sounds so different as the drumming of the 
snipe's tail, tapping of the wood-pecker's beak, harsh trumpet- 
like cry of certain waterfowd, the cooing of the turtle dove, and 
song of the nightingale, should all be pleasing to females of the 
several species. By chirps and songs the parent bird warns of 
approaching danger, calls to mates or cheers its young. Darwin 
thinks the sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the 
nearest analogy to language. The same instinctive cries are used 
to express emotions. They learn songs from their parents. Some 
birds of the same genus differ from others in speech as do people 
in dialects. "An instinctive tendency to acquire an art is not 
peculiar to man." 4 Some birds rehearse in private and practice 
improves. Bird songs are the result of imitation and account for 
development of bird-language in the past. In the least specialized 
birds the speech is infantile. Next comes a screaming or croak- 
ing. Samuel N. Rhoads 5 classifies bird language into three stages 
of mimetic development. I. Mimics of sound in animate nature 
exclusive of other bird notes. 2. Mimics of sounds in inanimate 
nature. 3. Mimics of song and human language, and he sepa- 
rates the sound mimics into mimics of water and wind sounds, 
rippling, raining, rushing water, and the blowing, whistling of 
the wind. He concludes that "between two opposing tendencies, 
one urging to variation the other to permanence (for nature itself 
is half radical, half conservative) the language of birds has grown 
from rude beginnings to its present beautiful diversity, and who- 
ever lives a century of milleniums hence will listen to music such 
as one in this day can only dream of. Inappreciably but cease- 
lessly the work goes on. Here and there is born a master singer, 
a feathered genius and every generation makes its own addition 
to the glorious inheritance." Bird sounds occur in great variety, 
one has a note like breaking of glass, another, the bell bird, makes 
a noise like the ringing of a bell, sometimes like the striking of 
an anvil. The horrible laugh of the Demarara goat sucker sounds 

* Ibid. 

rican Naturalist, 1889, P- 95- 



2IO THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

to some hearers as though some one were being murdered. The 
jackass penguin brays like a donkey and the laughing king-fisher, 
or laughing jackass of Australia, is often mentioned. The boom 
of the bittern was a familiar sound in many parts of England 
before the drainage of the fens. The American species makes a 
noise like hitting a stake with a mallet. The night heron has a 
hoarse croak. The fin-foot can make a deep growling sound 
like a wild beast by drawing air into its body and forcing it grad- 
ually from a duck-like throat. Snipe make a drumming noise, 
but only as they swoop down with half closed wings and out- 
spread tail, compared with the bleating of the goat. W. H. Hud- 
son says that in Argentina the screamers merely utter their power- 
ful scream of alarm occasionally, while at night or high in the 
air they are melodious and often congregate and sing in concert 
and at intervals, counting the hours as the Guachos say, somewhat 
as our domestic rooster does. The screamers are the noisiest 
about nine, midnight and before dawn, but varying in different 
districts. 

The lapwing of India is called "did-he-do-it" from his cry 
which alarms all worthier game and is cordially hated in conse- 
quence. Stilts of the plover tribe draw you away from their 
nests with their cry: "kit, kot, kit." The starling is a mimic 
and is able to copy familiar sounds faithfully, and is a very good 
vocalist. In Argentina spring is announced by spine-tails with 
harsh discordant notes. The lyre-bird imitates songs and cries 
of other birds and has play grounds like bower birds, each having 
its own parade ground. The long tailed trogan has a ventriloqual 
plaintive ha-hau, which sounds a long way off though the bird 
may be near you. The spur-fowl of Ceylon similarly misleads 
sportsmen and the purple capped lory is a ventriloquist. The 
Australian black swan has a musical call note when flying over- 
head at night. The bull finch can be taught to whistle the notes 
of human songs quite sweetly. 

The male white capped tanager remains near the nest and 
jerks out low notes of melody as though chattering love to the 
female on the nest. A. G. Butler tells of a blue robbin that "gave 
e\&ery insect he could catch to his sweetheart who coyly refused 
him for a fortnight, and when finally accepted he shrieked with 



LANGUAEG, 211 

joy for half an hour before and ten minutes after the pairing." 
Parrots and some other birds are able to articulate and while in 
the main the words are not associated with ideas in their minds 
in a few instances the words may be connected with definite 
meanings for them. Song and call notes of birds are learned 
from parents or foster-parents and are no more innate than is 
the language of man. The ability to develop the sounds is in- 
herited but the language is gained through instruction. The first 
attempts of a bird to sing may be compared to the imperfect en- 
deavor of a child to babble. Birds of the same species at a dis- 
tance from one another have dialects and allied though distinct 
species have separate languages. 

The domesticated fowl has a dozen significant sounds one of 
which gives warning for danger as from hawks, and hens recog- 
nize this signal. 

The house mouse is fond of music to which it listens atten- 
tivelv, and there are singing mice. One was known to trill up an 
octave standing upon its hind legs and its throat vibrated like 
that of a song bird. Male frogs and toads are musical. Hylae 
are quite harmonious chirpers. The chirping of a cricket is 
caused by the rubbing of the fore wings, elytra, together. Their 
organs of hearing are on their fore legs. If a man could leap in 
proportion to his height as far as a flea does in proportion to his, 
he could jump a hundred feet, and if a man could sing as loud 
as a grasshopper cicada, his voice would be heard many miles. 
A hoarse rumble in the throat of the elephant indicates anger or 
want as when a calf is calling for its mother. Pleasure is ex- 
pressed by a continued low squeaking through the trunk. The 
shrill trumpet varies in tone and expresses sometimes fear or 
anger. A roar from the throat, fear or pain. Alarm or dislike 
is indicated by rapping of the trunk upon the ground and blowing 
through it at the same time, as when a tiger is present. 

Livingstone says there is but little difference between the roar 
of the lion and that of the ostrich. The amount of noise one 
wolf can make is surprising. And wolves learn to bark by asso- 
ciation with domestic dogs. The Australian dingo or wild dog 
never barks. 



212 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Ants communicate with their antennae by what can be called 
touch sense gesture, comparable to deaf and dumb signs. Various 
noises such as croaking, snapping, etc., are made by certain spe- 
cies of fish. The drumming noise of the Umbrinas is said to be 
heard from a depth of twenty fathoms. The males alone make 
the noise to attract females. 

Batrachians are noisy fellows during the breeding season. 
The females select the males with loudest or most pleasing voices. 
The male Galapagos tortoise, Testudo nigra, at the pairing sea- 
son utters a hoarse bellowing noise and the female is dumb. The 
crocodile makes a great noise and splash and swells up to attract 
the female, as little boys run and parade before their little girl 
admirers, and the knights errant of old swaggered before their 
lady observers. 

Darwin observes that the domesticated dog has learned to 
bark in four or five tones. The bark of eagerness as in the chase, 
of anger as well as growling, the yelp or howl of despair, the 
baying at night, the bark of joy and the one of demand or suppli- 
cation. Dogs understand many words and sentences. They are 
at the same stage as infants at ten or twelve months who under- 
stand many words but cannot speak. Max Muller thinks that 
animals cannot form ideas, but Darwin denies this and shows 
that a dog forms an idea of cats or sheep and knows the words 
as well as a philosopher, and it is proof of a vocal intelligence 
to an inferior degree. 

Bears leave messages and warnings by scratches and odors 
left on barks of trees and dogs communicate, as may be readily 
observed by any one, with other dogs by leaving their odors on 
posts, stumps, stones or any convenient object above ground and 
other dogs recognize the route of friends or strangers by nosing 
around these canine intelligence offices. Miserly crows are said 
to be able to count thirty and to drill and talk to their young. 

The speech of animals is unknown to us and often for similar 
reasons we cannot distinguish foreigners apart. 

R. L. Garner 6 studied the speech of various monkeys and de- 
termined nine sounds used by the Capuchins, and the sound for 

B The Speech of Monkeys, 1892. 



LANGUAGE. 213 

food and another for alarm in the Resus dialect. A brown Cebus 
readily understood the phonograph sound of his call for food and 
fled in alarm when he heard the note of danger. Garner con- 
cludes that the sounds made by monkeys are voluntary, deliber- 
ate and articulate. They are always addressed to some certain 
individual with the evident purpose of having them understood. 
The monkey indicates by his own acts and the manner of delivery 
that he is conscious of the meaning of the sounds. They wait 
for and expect an answer and if they do not receive one they fre- 
quently repeat the sounds. They usually look at the person ad- 
dressed, and do not utter these sounds when alone or as a mere 
pastime, but only at such times as someone is present to hear 
them, either some person or another monkey. They understand 
the signs made by other monkeys of their own kind and usually 
respond to them with a like sound. They understand these 
sounds when imitated by a human being, by a whistle, a phono- 
graph or other mechanical devices, and this indicates that they 
are guided by the sounds alone, and not by any gestures or mental 
influence. The same sound is interpreted to mean the same thing 
and obeyed in the same manner by different monkeys of the same 
species. Different sounds are accompanied by different gestures, 
and produce different results under the same conditions. They 
make their sounds with their vocal organs and modulate them 
with the teeth, tongue and lips. The fundamental sounds appear 
to be pure vowels, but faint traces of consonants are found in 
many words, especially those of low pitch. Darwin notes that 
in Paraguay the Cebus azarae utters at least six distinct sounds 
which excite in monkeys emotions corresponding to the sounds. 
The movement of features and gestures of monkeys are under- 
stood by us and they partly understand our expressions of the 
kind. Some gibbon apes sing, and Professor Haeckel claims that 
the gibbon speaks quite fluently. He has not many sounds but 
these few he uses with so much expression that he is able to make 
known a great variety of wishes and impressions. He talks 
almost constantly and even when left alone he speaks to himself. 
The Hylobates leuciscus or ash gray gibbon of Wagner spe- 
cially investigated by Haeckel uses his few words with gestures 
and face grimaces and tones so that the Javanese can understand 



2 14. THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

his meaning, wishes and troubles. The oa, as he is called, purrs 
like a cat when satisfied and at play uses loud sounds. He shouts 
for food with outstretched hands. The monkey-chatter may be 
likened to ''metaphysics" which Muller calls a disease of language. 

The chattering of some monkeys may convey their meaning 
by modulations or intonations somewhat as a prolonged or inter- 
rupted whistle may be different signals. According to Blanford 
the voice and gestures of all macacques are similar, quoting Col- 
onel Tickell, another observer, who says, "anger is generally sil- 
ent or a hoarse "hell." Ennui is expressed by a whining "horn." 
Invitation, deprecation, entreaty, by smacking of lips and grin- 
ning and a chuckle. Fear by "kra" or "kraouk." 

The chacma baboon has a warning cry like the German 
"hoch," much prolonged. The capuchin monkey cries with a low 
whistle which serves to attract attention. The Indri lemur's 
plaintive mournful cries resemble agonized human wailings. The 
aye-aye (lemur) is called Hi-Hi by the natives from the sound it 
makes. It taps the bark and listens for its prey beneath, thus 
saving time and labor. The howlers use their drum shaped 
larynx with little effort; the noise is probably useful in driving 
away enemies. Travelers speak of the sounds as dreadful. The 
young, orang screams like a child for what it wants. The gibbon 
greets the rising and setting sun with cries morning and evening 
sounding like "Hoo-lock," and suggests that name to the natives, 
or "whoop-poo." 

Music, says Darwin, affects every emotion, but does not in 
itself excite in us the most terrible feelings of horror, rage, etc. 
It awakes the gentler feelings of tenderness and love which 
readily pass into devotion. It likewise stirs up in us the sensa- 
tion of triumph and the glorious ardor of war. These powerful 
and mingled feelings may well ^ive rise to the sense of sublimity. 
We can concentrate, as Dr. Seeman observes, greater intensity 
of feeling in a single musical note than in pages of writing. 
Nearly the same emotions, but much weaker and less complex, 
are probably felt by the birds when the male pours forth his vol- 
ume of song in rivalry with other males, for the sake of capti- 
vating the female. Love is still the commonest theme of our own 
songs. As Herbert Spencer remarks, music arouses dormant 



LANGUAGE. 215 

sentiments of which we had not conceived the possibility, and we 

do not know the meaning; or, as Richter says, "tells us of things 
we have not seen and shall not see.'' Conversely, when vivid 
emotions are felt and expressed by the orator or even in common 
speech, musical cadences and rhythm are instinctively used. 
Monkeys also express strong feelings in different tones, anger and 
impatience by low, fear and pain by high notes. The sensations and 
ideas excited in us by music or by the cadences of impassioned 
oratory, appear from their vagueness yet depth, like mental rever- 
sions to the emotions and thoughts of a long-past age. All these 
facts with respect to music become to a certain extent intelligible 
if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by 
the half-human progenitors of man, during the season of court- 
ship, when animals of all kinds are excited by all passions. In 
this case from the deeply-laid principle of inherited associations, 
musical tones would be likely to excite in us, in a vague and in- 
definite manner, the strong emotions of a long past age. Bearing 
in mind that the males in some quadrumanous animals have their 
vocal organs much more developed than in the females, and that 
one man-like species pours forth a whole octave of musical notes 
and may be said to sing, the suspicion does not appear improbable 
that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both 
sexes, before they had acquired the pow r er of expressing their 
love in articulate language, endeavored to charm each other with 
musical notes and rhythm. So little is known about the use of 
the voice by the quadrumana during the season of love that w r e 
have hardly any means of judging whether the habit of singing 
was first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind. 
Women are said to. possess sweeter voices than men, and as far 
as this serves as any guide we may infer that they first acquired 
musical powers to attract the other sex. But if so, this must 
have occurred long ago, before the progenitors of man had be- 
come sufficiently human to treat and value their women as use- 
ful slaves. The impassioned orator, bard or musician, when with 
his varied tones and cadences he excites strong emotions in his 
hearers little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at 
extremely remote periods, his half human ancestors aroused each 
other's ardent passions, during their mutual courtship and rivalry. 
Spencer derives modern songs from the ancient recitative or 



2l6 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

mere monotonous "sing-song" of the early wandering poet who 
flattered kings and others in power by boasting of their deeds. In 
still ruder times "discordant noises, the beating of tom-toms and 
the shrill notes of reeds pleased the savage ear." 7 Sir S. Baker 
remarks that "as the stomach of the Arab prefers the raw meat 
and reeking liver taken hot from the animal so does his ear prefer 
the discordant noises to all others." 

Canon Kingsley in his Hypatia eloquently describes the beau- 
tiful sacred music heard in the temples of the heathen gods in 
Alexandria and elsewhere, and among the Mormons of Utah 
popular airs such as "Lilly Dale" were excellently sung in the 
great tabernacle in Salt Lake City, but to words expressing hatred 
and revenge. Every religion has found singing to be a good 
accessory means of arousing devotion. It was recorded that the 
Mohammedans sang and wept with joy as they dragged their 
cannons over the Macedonian mountains thinking that their con- 
quest of the Greeks was the forerunner of Mohammed's prophecy 
that his followers should rule the world. It is a great shock to 
one influenced by sacred music to learn that other religions and 
even pagan idol worshippers make use of beautiful harmony and 
melody in their devotions. 

While the original Hawaiian music was very monotonous 
and more a bumpy-time-keeping for their sacred dances, the pres- 
ent generation of natives sing as well as Europeans and their 
love songs are peculiarly pathetic and are much admired. 

Professor Ensel of the Music Teachers Association is respon- 
sible for the statement that when the army of the first Napoleon 
was in Egypt in 1799 the camp for awhile was near the pyramids. 
One afternoon about sunset the band was playing. The inhabi- 
tants of the desert had collected near and were listening to the 
music. Nothing unusual happened until the band struck up 
"Malbrook s'en va t'en guerre," better known to English speak- 
ing people as "We won't go home till morning." Instantly there 
was the wildest joy among the Bedoins. They embraced each 
other and shouted and danced in delirious pleasure. The reason 
was that they were listening to the favorite and oldest tune of 
their people. Professor Ensel said that the tune had been taken 

* Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch. XIII, Vol. II. 



LANGUAGE. 217 

from Africa to Europe in the thirteenth century by the crusaders 

and had lived separately in both countries for six hundred wars. 
It had been in France years before Marlborough was playing 
havoc with French soldiery in Malplaquet, Blenheim and Ramilies 
in Queen Anne's time. Malbrook was the nearest approach to 
the pronunciation of Marlborough. "There is a happy land far 
far away" are the words adapted to an ancient Hindoo national 
air, the accent being on the first note of each bar, an archaic 
method adjusted to timbrel rattling and the jingling of the ank- 
lets. Even today children unconsciously copy this in starting 
each line with loud stress on the first words. This adaptation of 
music of the "enemy" by preachers is quite an old story. It was 
Charles Wesley who said that he could not understand why the 
devil should have all the good music and thereupon put many of 
his brother John's hymns and his own to the popular song's of 
the day. The experiment was successful and this capture of well 
known song tunes was the beginning of that congregational sing- 
ing characteristic of the methodist church. Moody and Sankey 
followed in Wesley's footsteps. Missionaries to the Hawaiian 
Islands adapted native words to old English hymn tunes so that 
Hawaiian music is merely New England hymns. 

It is well known that the piano evolved from the harp but it 
is not so well known that the bag-pipe (utricularius) was known 
in the time of Nero. Some musicians claim that the highest 
music is represented by Beethoven's sonata. An instance of pre- 
human music is afforded by the time marking thumping by the 
chimpanzee on his drum of clay. An evidence of the love-making 
intention of musical cultivation lies in the fact that so many good 
piano players among women abandon their music altogether after 
marriage. R. E. C. Stearns 8 experimented upon animals with 
music with the result of the discovery that among those who love 
music may be included pigeons, hares, seals, hippopotami, squir- 
rels, mice, pigs, sheep, goats, oxen, cows. Cats try to get as near 
your mouth as possible to ascertain the source of the whistling or 
singing. Some are made uneasy but others evidently relish music. 
Of course birds are attracted by music. The wolf, hyena and dog 
are frightened by music while the alligator appeared to be indif- 

8 American Naturalist, Feb. and March, 1890. 



21 S THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ferent to it. Others have observed that some dogs did not object 
to piano playing but howled dismally when a cornet or violin was 
tried. Wolves can be started to howling by whistling. 

Language owes its origin, in Darwin's opinion, to imitation 
and modifications of imitations of various natural sounds, the 
voices of other animals and man's own instinctive cries aided by 
signs and gestures. Primeval man, says Spencer, probably first 
used his voice in courtship singing, and by analogy this power 
would have been especially exerted to express various emotions 
as love, jealousy, triumph, and as a challenge to rivals. Imitation 
is strong in low races, monkeys and idiots. Man alone can asso- 
ciate together the most diversified sounds and ideas and this 
depends upon the high development of his mental powers. 

Articulate language is practically confined to man but he uses 
inarticulate cries as do animals, aided by gestures and grimaces, 
especially with regard to simple feelings that are but little con- 
nected with higher intelligence. Our cries of pain, fear, surprise, 
anger, with appropriate actions, and the murmur of the mother 
to her beloved child are more expressive than words. Darwin 
suggests that the imitation of a growl of a beast of prey by some 
ape-like animal used to warn his fellows could have been- the first 
step in language. While mind developed language the latter also 
reacted upon mind to develop it further especially where thoughts 
required words, just as calculation does figures and symbols. 

Sayce thinks that the speechless man of earliest times ex- 
pressed himself as the Bushmen of Australia do now by means 
of clicks, and the Hottentot "clop-slop-flop" language causing 
Hollanders to name tribes from the sounds made by their talking, 
further shows how there may be many different methods of speak- 
ing. Many tribes omit consonants familiar to us. 

Man is born mute and depends upon teachers for language, 
so man existed before the use of language was known. Hens- 
leigh Wedgwood 9 refers to foreigners resorting to gestures when 
trying to make themselves understood when the language of the 
place is unknown, and he quotes the lines of Tom Hood : 

9 The Origin of Language, London, 1866. 



LANGUAGE. 219 

"Moo, I cried, for milk, 

If I wanted bread, 

My jaws I set a-going, 

And asked for new laid eggs 

By clapping hands and crowing." 
Muller tells of an Englishman asking his Chinese cook about 
some meat he had eaten: "Quack, quack?" The Chinaman re- 
plied "Bow-wow." 

Garrick Mallery 10 divides gesture speech into body, limb and 
face motions and refers to the instance of Gallaudet, the famous 
instructor of deaf-mutes, who by means of his facial movements, 
and with his arms folded, imparted the story of Brutus killing 
his two sons to a pupil who afterwards wrote correctly what he 
understood the teacher to have told by his face alone. 

The gestures of young children, especially pouting, are iden- 
tical with those of higher apes. The Neapolitans talk not only 
with their hands but with their faces, and Mallery 11 says there is 
excuse for believing that the revolt called the Sicilian Vesper., 
was arranged throughout the island without the use of a syllable, 
and even the day and hour for the massacre of the obnoxious for- 
eigners was fixed upon by facial expression, without even manual 
signs. Some of the" common signs Taylor cites as used in Naples 
are waving the hand to indicate folly, finger and thumb rubbed 
together mean money, squinting signifies a cheat, finger to mouth 
means silence, wiping perspiration from forehead expresses fa- 
tigue. Taylor speaks of King Ferdinand returning to Naples 
after the revolt of 1821 and finding that the boisterous people 
jvould not allow him to be heard resorted successfully to a royal 
address in signs, giving reproaches, threats, admonitions, pardon 
and dismissal to the entire satisfaction of the assembled multitude. 
The history of the Sicilian gesture is also given by Taylor who 
says that the Sicinians being its aborigines Sicily was colonized 
by the Greeks in separate. bands who had different dialects, which 
became further unlike as time passed, the oligarchies or tyrants 
warring with one another until the fifth century, when Carthage 
added to the mixture, followed by Roman, Vandal, Gothic, Heru- 

10 Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1879 to 1880, p. 269. 

11 Ibid, p. 296. 



220 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

lian, Arab and Norman subjugation. As dialects multiply so do 
gestures and they decrease together as the necessity for signs 
depart with a more general language. Addison in the London 
Spectator contended against gestures in public speaking and the 
English repress movements of the kind even in conversation while 
many other people resort to even violent and unnecessary motion 
while talking. 

The dog gesticulates in his fawning to show submissiveness, 
and turns on his back to tell the big dog that he is helpless in his 
presence. He jumps and springs to attract attention and to show 
joy, and pulls clothing to draw a person away. Deaf-mutes re- 
sort to expressive motions and cultivate a sign language and when 
disease of the brain interferes with speech the patients sometimes 
resort to motions to convey meaning. 

Gesture language is essentially the same all over the world, 
nor does it depend upon poverty of language for the Neapolitan 
is the richest dialect of the Italian group. Mallery quotes Clark 
as saying that Indians of different tribes had been married for 
years and had never learned a word of each other's language, 
their communications being by signs entirely. The plan of 
thought in sign language suggests primitive speech, especially 
isolating languages. Articles, conjunctions and prepositions are 
omitted in sign language and adjectives follow the verbs. All 
verbs are given in the present tense, and both nouns and verbs 
appear only in the singular number, the idea of plurality being 
expressed by some other way. Abbreviations are constantly prac- 
ticed. To illustrate this, Capt. Clark gives the following imagin- 
ary speech : "I arrived here today to make a treaty. I have 
with me one hundred lodges which are camped beyond the Black 
Hills near the Yellowstone River. Take pity on me for I am poor 
and I have five children who are sick and without food. The 
snow is deep and the weather is very cold." The signs used to 
convey this would be those for the following words : "I-arrive- 
today - make - treaty - my - ioo - lodge - camp - beyond - Hills - 
Black - River - Elk - you - chief - great - to pity - I - poor - my - 
5 - child - sick - food - wiped out - snow - deep - cold - strong." 

The well known story of a dog who brought another dog with 
a broken leg to the surgeon who had cured his leg when broken 



LANGUAGE. 221 

plainly proves that in some way he had told his friend what the 
surgeon could do for him. 

A. Graham Bell, the telephone inventor, is accredited by Gar- 
rick Mallery" with having taught an English terrier to say dis- 
tinctly, "How are you Grandmamma?" Of course the dog was 
unable to attach any meaning to the words, but other dogs have 
shown by their acts that they understood many things said to 
them, and it is often told of old house dogs that they disap- 
peared when there is talk, in their presence, of destroying them. 

Sometimes gesture language consists in pointing out the ob- 
ject thought of or picturing it in the air. An universal method 
of indicating a day is to point to the course of the sun in the sky 
by a wave of the hand from one horizon to the other. 

Laura Bridgman was a deaf-mute and blind pupil of Dr. 
Howe of Boston, and could only be communicated with by finger 
motions, that she felt, and that she thought in these terms alone 
was evident in her moving her ringers as though she were con- 
versing when she was dreaming. Dogs also move their limbs and 
bark in their dreams. 

The inimitable work of Darwin on Expression of the Emo- 
tions in Man and Animals affords many facts which can with 
advantage be referred to in this matter of language in general. 
Practically when mental states are outwardly expressed by move- 
ments of any part of the body such movements may be regarded 
as gestures, and it matters nothing whether the will is or is not 
concerned, such gestures serve as communication, to others, 
though at times that may not be intended. 

Under three main principles Darwin groups this sort of lan- 
guage : I. The principle of serviceable associated habit. That 
is, when certain movements of the body have proven to be service- 
able, the movements tend to be repeated whenever the mind re- 
calls these movements, though there may be no use in doing so. 
Certain states of mind are thus associated with habits of move- 
ments and the muscles concerned in the movement contract more 
or less according to the will power exerted in the suppression of 
expression, and sometimes checking one habitual motion requires 

12 Ibid, p. 275. 



222 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

other slight movements, and these also are expressive. Muscles 
that are the least controlled by the will are most liable to act. 

2. The principle of antithesis : Certain mental states leading 
to certain habitual acts and an opposite state of mind occurring 
there is a strong tendency to use motions that are the opposite 
of those induced by the first principle. 

3. Nerve currents may cause movements other than habitual 
or voluntary ones. 

We can group all expressions under these three heads : 
When expulsive efforts are made the muscles around the eye 
contract to protect the blood vessels from rupture in the delicate 
structures there. This is serviceable but the eye may be shut 
sometimes to denote a mental state associated with the impulse 
to close it from harm. Fear when strong expresses itself in cries, 
in efforts to hide or escape, in palpitations and tremblings. The 
destructive passions are shown in tension of muscles, gnashing of 
teeth, protruded claws, dilated eyes and nostrils, and in growls 
and these are the motions of killing prey. Laughter, Spencer re- 
gards as due to an overflow of nerve force, but its origin in my 
opinion is in the eating motions. 13 A dog expresses his love and 
humility by drooping ears, hanging lips, flexible body and wag- 
ging tail. With mankind bristling of hair, uncovering of teeth, 
point to man having existed in a much lower and animal-like 
condition. Monkeys and men use the same muscles in laughter. 
Habit increases the conducting power of nerve fibres with fre- 
quency of excitement. Muscles also grow in size with use and 
the apparatus of motion, sensation and thinking become similarly 
stronger with exercise. Inheritance and habit together may not 
only fix but intensify certain acts such as ambling and cantering 
of horses, which may not be natural to them, also in the pointing 
and setting of dogs and peculiar flight of certain pigeons. In 
men there can be certain tricks of gesture also transmitted. Men 
learn to put on gloves and wind their watches unconsciously, 
they may fail to remember when they did so, but at first these 
acts are learned by attention. Even piano playing may be done 
while asleep, by one who has studied the method previously until 
able to play unconsciously. A rustic often scratches his head 

13 Comparative Physiology and Psychology, 1884. 



LANGUAGE. 223 

from habit when perplexed, as if he felt an uncomfortable sen- 
sation. Another rubs his eyes or coughs when embarassed. ( )ne 
who rejects a proposition shuts his eyes or turns away his face, 
but if he accepts he will nod his head and open his eyes widely. 
Persons describing a horrid sight shut their eyes or shake their 
heads as though to escape something disagreeable. In looking 
suddenly at any object the eyes may be quickly and widely opened 
and in trying to remember you may raise your eyebrows as if try- 
ing to see better, and in recalling a name may glance at various 
parts of the room as though you expected the name to appear to 
your eyesight. 

Cutting with scissors and learning to write may be associated 
with absurd tongue motions. When a public singer or speaker 
becomes hoarse you may hear a number of persons clearing their 
throats sympathetically. At leaping matches some spectators 
move their feet, and in watching various performances children 
and a few adults sometimes unconsciously imitate the movement 
they are watching. Reflex acts such as sneezing, coughing and 
breathing are to some extent concerned in expression. There is 
involuntary closure of the eyelids when the eyeball is threatened. 
A wink. Associated serviceable habitual movements in the lower 
animals are cited to show that movements originally performed 
for a purpose are still used from habit even though ceasing to be 
useful. Dogs when they wish to lie down turn round and round 
and scratch the ground in a senseless manner, as if they intended 
to trample down the grass and scoop out a hollow as their wild 
parents did in the woods or plains. Jackals do this but wolves 
do not. A half idiotic dog was observed to turn round thirteen 
times before going to sleep. Dogs crouch in approaching one 
another as their wild ancestors did in nearing their prey. Dogs, 
wolves and jackals scratch backward, even on a smooth surface, 
but if this motion was ever serviceable in their ancestory it has 
degenerated into a mere ceremony, looking like a superstitious 
observance. Cats, wolves, jackals and foxes cover up superflu- 
ous food and in these motions we have a useless remnant of habit- 
ual movements originally followed by some progenitor of the dog 
genus and retained for a prodigious length of time. Horses paw 
the ground when eager to start and also when about to be fed 



224 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

com or oats. Cats may shake their feet when they hear water 
poured as they do when their feet are wet. An habitual move- 
ment excited by an associated sound instead of touch. From 
these and other instances Darwin concludes that in accordance 
with the first principle when any sensation, desire, dislike, etc., 
has led during a long series of generations to some voluntary 
movement then a tendency to the performance of a similar move- 
ment will almost certainly be excited whenever the same or anal- 
ogous or associated sensation, although very weak, may be ex- 
cited or experienced, notwithstanding that the movements in this 
case may not be of the least use. Such habitual movements are 
often or are generally inherited, and they then differ but little 
from the reflex actions. The principle of Antithesis is repre- 
sented in the dog when angry holding himself stiff and straight 
and with erect hair, and when fawning on his master the very 
opposite condition is assumed, he becomes curved and wiggles 
up and down and from side to side. The cat crouches with ears 
drawn back and tail swinging when angry, with back curved 
and hair bristled, but when pleased the back is arched and tail is 
erect and puss rubs herself leaning against your leg. All these 
movements characterize every species and variety of the dog and 
cat families. Dogs show instantaneous change between pleasure 
and dejection and are often distracted between contending de- 
sires. Dogs in play pretend to fight and bite but are careful not 
to do harm. The motion to be gone is an associated gesture and 
its antithesis is the pull toward you, and these kinds of antithe- 
tical gestures are inherited. Children are more apt to have con- 
vulsions than to tremble and among adults trembling is caused 
by cold, during blood poisoning, delirium tremens, old age, ex- 
haustion, pain, fear and occasionally anger and joy. Music may 
produce a shiver down the back. Strong excitement of the nerv- 
ous system interrupting a steady flow of nerve force to the mus- 
cles accounts for trembling. Strong emotions affecting various 
organs show similar outflow of energy. The heart is particularly 
sensitive to stimulation either physical or mental; and the vaso- 
motor system regulating blushing and pallor is also responsive 
unless habit has regulated or checked such exhibitions of emotion. 
The fluffing of feathers and the swelling out of some animals 



LANGUAGE. 225 

is to appear as formidable as possible and to frighten enemies, 
and for this purpose many sounds are used, but the drawing back 
and the pressure of the ears close to the head is to keep them 
from being bitten. Showing the teeth, especially the canine, is 
useful as a threat and survives in man in his sneer. Nodding 
and shaking the head is presumed to have originated in accepting 
and rejecting food. 

The wide opening of the eyes in fear and surprise is service- 
able so as to see as quickly as possible all around us and the ears 
may involuntarily be pricked up to enable us to hear better, for 
we have habitually prepared ourselves thus to discover and en- 
counter danger. Headlong flight or struggle is prepared for by 
rapid heart action, dilated nostrils and heaving chest and the ex- 
haustion may follow such preparatory conditions though the ex- 
ercise was not taken, through the force of inheritance and asso- 
ciation. 

Oppressed breathing is associated with horror and the feel- 
ing of relief is expressed by a deep drawn breath, and sighing 
could express the attempt to physically relieve a mentally unpleas- 
ant feeling. All such expressions and vastly more are inter- 
preted by beholders more or less correctly and are therefore clas- 
sified as signs, gestures, hieroglyphics of conditions that may be 
read and understood, hence they are to some extent symbolic 
language and indeed when these motions are voluntarily per- 
formed they can be made to convey ideas of fear, disgust, pleas- 
ure, etc., as effectually as writing or speech. 

That facial expression is an underestimated part of conver- 
sation observe how closely some watch each others faces to tell 
whether the speaker is in earnest and to learn meanings from 
the expression as well as from the words. Speaking in the dark 
loses much of the help of face appearance and other movements 
as accessories to speech. 

YVvllie gives a diagram of development of speech in the 
child. The first year tears and crying are the main emotional 
expressions, while grunting, laughing and smiling increase with 
facial expression and gestures, babbling and crowing. The sec- 
ond year crying decreases and grunting ceases, babbling and cry- 
ing grow less, and words are freelv invented, mimicrv and echo- 



226 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

lalia grow and the understanding of spoken words increases. 
The third year crying is much less, laughing, smiling, facial ex- 
pression, gestures are more frequent, the understanding of words 
spoken increases and intelligent speech production which begins 
usually about the middle of the second year has now greatly im- 
proved. Words are less invented at this age than earlier ; babb- 
ling, crowing cease, mimic acting and echolalia decrease. So at 
first there predominates inarticulate sounds, next facial and other 
gestures, then babbling, crowing, then intelligent speech. 

W. H. Bates 14 says that seven or eight languages may be 
spoken within two hundred miles of the river by Brazilian tribes. 
Indian languages may become quickly corrupted by their tendency 
to invent slang which amuses them and may be adopted. A few 
years of separation of parts of tribes render their languages 
unlike. 

A child says "I corned," "I goed," "badder," "baddest." Chil- 
dren conjugate irregular verbs in a regular manner. 

The remarkable peculiarity has been observed in several 
widely separate peoples, as in the Carribean Sea and in Green- 
land, of a language spoken only by the males and another lan- 
guage by the females of a tribe. This strange custom is ac- 
counted for by Hervas 15 quoted by Max Miiller 16 who says that 
"the Carib women of the Antilles spoke a language different from 
their husbands because the Caribs had killed the whole male 
population of the Avawakes and married their women, and some- 
thing similar seems to have taken place among some of the tribes 
of Greenland." 

W. D. Whitney remarked that spoken language began when 
a cry of pain was imitated to indicate that "I am suffering," and 
when an angry growl, the direct expression of passion, was re- 
produced to signify disapprobation, threatening, and the like. 

Wilhelm von Humbolt clearly laid down the principle that 
copious vocabularies are not a proof of excellence any more than 
a copious gabbling is proof of intellect. In Tierra del Fuego 
there are vast numbers of words to express silly differences of 

14 The Naturalist on the Amazon. 

15 Hervas, Catologo, I, p. 369. 
36 Science of Language, p. 48. 



LANGUAGE. 227 

one idea and the Eskimo have twenty words to signify fishing 
for particular kinds of animals but have no word "to fish" in 
general. Regularity of structure or abundance of grammatical 
forms does not confer high rank on a language for both traits 
are common in low degenerate tongues. Regular verbs with 
one conjugation indicate isolation and poverty of ideas because 
other people have transmitted nothing through contact. Irregular 
verbs come from assimilation with other tongues. 

Language being a natural faculty is capable of constant im- 
provement and has advanced steadily. Slang sometimes survives 
when all else perished in a language and by dropping the unneces- 
sary the necessary survives. Chinese is fixed and decaying while 
English is growing, absorbing, living. 

Max Muller 17 says that "As soon as man began to observe, 
to name and to know the movements and changes in the world 
around him, he suspected that there was something behind what 
he saw, that there must be an agent for every action, a mover 
for every movement. Instead of saying and thinking as we do 
today, the rain, the thunder, the moon, he said the thunderer, the 
rainer, the measurer, he rains, he thunders, without caring as 
yet as to who he might be. His earliest concepts consisted in the 
consciousness of his own repeated acts. The act and the actor, 
the movement and the mover were expressed by the same word. 
All such words as oration, pension, picture, were names of acts 
before they became names of objects. After a time no doubt the 
human mind accustomed itself to look upon the actions as inde- 
pendent of the agents, the cutter became a ship, the cutting be- 
came a slice, the writing became a book. But the chain from 
the active root to the passive nouns was never broken and every 
link is there to attest the continuous progress of human language 
and thought. The most prominent phenomena of nature were 
named by the Aryas as in the instance of naming the storm 
wind 'the smasher* Mar-ut, the smasher, from Mar to smash, 
indicating the god of the storm wind as the one who smashes." 

The same process of naming the most prominent phenomena 
of nature led in the end to a complete physical pantheon. Not 
only trees, mountains and rivers were named as agents but the 
17 Anthropological Religion, Lecture III, p. 71. 



228 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

sea and the earth, the fire, wind, sky, stars, sun, dawn, moon, day 
and night were all represented under different names as agents. 
When no others than human agents were known other agents 
were conceived as like human agents. Next the agent or power 
was spoken of as more than human, superhuman. Then came a 
recognition of the animate from inanimate. There was supposed 
to be a power behind actions. The history of the word deva in 
Sanskrit, and deus in Latin explains the conception of deity 
among the Aryan ancestors better than anything. The highest 
generalizations were that there was but one god. 

Silly words to emotional songs are popular as the intelligence 
is not bothered with trying to get at any meaning. Songs which 
are outbursts of feeling are more sure to elicit response of the 
audience than when intelligible words are used. So the prima- 
donna whose language is not known by the audience is most pop- 
ular, according to Noire. The chants of rude nations are inar- 
ticulate words. Indians in America accompany their dances 
with Hi-ya — Hi-ya, monotonously repeated to a limited range 
of notes. There is no more meaning to such words than there 
is to baby talk. 

Tyler says that in South America a bird with a large nose 
was called the tou-can, or big beak, and the name was also trans- 
ferred to Indians who had big noses, and in this way words may 
grow and change in use. Our word aquiline is used to mean a 
curved nose like that of the eagle. 

Hammer was in the old German hamar, which in Sanscrit 
means stone, and stone hammers were the first to be used. A 
surprisingly direct proof of the Aryan derivation of English and 
German. 

The roots from which most words are constructed are not 
numerous. There are less than two thousand in Sanscrit, only 
five hundred in Hebrew and four hundred and fifty in Chinese, 
and still less in some other languages. 18 Sir John Lubbock 
found pa and ma primitive and universal. The devices for in- 
creasing the power and range of language consist in intonation, 
reduplication, combining old words and making new words. Ta 
has twenty-six different meanings in Chinese and hence the 

18 Max Miiller, ibid. 



LANGUAGE. 22g 

chance that it will coincide with some meaning of the sound of 
ta in other languages is twenty-six times greater than with many 
other words. 

Max Midler grudgingly admits the truth of onomatopoeia, 
which he dubbed formerly the bow-wow theory, these natural 
sounds suggesting the names that are readily recognized, such 
as bow-wow, cackle, cluck, gobble, quack, caw, croak, neigh, 
whinny, bray, bark, yelp, howl, snarl, purr, mew, grunt, roar, 
bellow, low, bleat, chirp, chatter. The hog was named from the 
imitation of the sound the animal made. The English cock is a 
contraction of cock-a-doodle-doo. The English owl is Eule in 
German, ulula in Latin, ulu in Hindu and mulek in Egyptian. 

Words that imitate the sounds of nature are classed as onoma- 
topoetic, as when a bird or other animal is named by imitating its 
cry, as hawk represents not only the noise this chicken thief makes 
but the name of the chicken's shriek to announce its approach. So 
hens and people name the hawk alike. Other natural sounds are 
those of the wind, the roaring of the waterfall, drip and patter of 
the rain and from the sounds made the names become associated. 
These sounds do not impress the senses of all alike but sometimes 
so nearly so that they are suspected of having been borrowed 
from other languages when they originated separately as coinci- 
dences. 

Calling the sheep "ba," and naming the dog from his bark 
was called the bow-wow theory by Max Miiller and while he was 
right as rejecting it as an explanation of all naming of objects, 
he went too far in rejecting it altogether, and compromised by 
adopting the onomatopoetic theory which means the same thing. 
Deriving language from interjection, the necessity for exclaiming 
or giving vent to emotion by sounds, such as neighing, crowing, 
roaring, Miiller calls the "pooh-pooh" theory. Midler's own 
theory was that every being was created with a typical sound to 
enable man to have a copious phonetic world. This was in accord 
with the old fashioned idea that every thing was made with a 
definite purpose and Miiller's critics called his notion the "ding- 
dong" theory. This is part of the notion that such vast bodies as 
the stars were created for astrological use in determining the 



23O THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

births and deaths of men, as we can imagine the rat thinking that 
the entire house and cellar contents were made for him only. 

Interjections such as ah, ha-ha, hum, ugh, tut, pooh, are de- 
rived from involuntary expressions. Bang, in imitation of the 
bang of a gun, becomes a verb to "bang the door." Slam is an- 
other verb derived from the noise made. Children universally 
try to imitate natural sounds and learn by mimicry of older per- 
sons. Several nations use the word hist for silence. Hust and 
whist and the Gaelic wist are also common. The German has 
pst, the Danish tys, Swedish tyst, French, chut, Italian zitto. The 
English use mum as a caution that the mouth should be closed. 
Sh is said with lifted finger. Delight is indicated by smacking 
the lips, or rubbing the belly, and Mallery speaks of the slang 
yum-yum being used to denote fondness, and the Papuans call 
eating nam-nam. Such words as biting, gnawing, grinning, 
smearing, belong to the second stage of language evolution and 
are not starting points. 

The natural expressions of the emotions, the inarticulate 
cries of pain or pleasure, fright, suspicion or admiration are not 
exactly the same in all languages, but being often based upon 
similar vowel sounds the articulate words from them are liable 
to be nearly alike. The ah sound, also, prevails in such often 
used words as papa, mamma, father, which are quite similar in 
different languages. But there are also mere coincidences which 
other things prove to be such and that there were no associations 
of languages in such cases as when the Maya Indians of Yucatan 
used the word hoi for our hole, poll for head and even battel for 
battle. These are all assumed to be accidental. 

As resemblances were constantly being seen where they did 
not exist and as differences were also mistaken where resem- 
blances should have been noted, the naming process of applying a 
term for a group of similar objects was a confused one, such as 
calling all trees firs, and some trees oaks, and finally mistaking 
oaks for firs until in some places such changed names exist today. 
Time and cutting off changed many words by survival of the 
fittest word to exist, which was often far from being the best, 
as in other instances of natural selection. The essence of lan- 
guage says Wedgwood, is a system of vocal signs. The mental 



LANGUAGE. 23 I 

process of speech is the same as by gestures such as the deaf 
and dumb employ. A nod or the shake of the head is the same as 
yes and no. The gesture is addressed to sight and the words to 
hearing. Deaf persons are mutes if they have never heard speech, 
those who have become deaf after having previously spoken pre- 
serve their speaking faculty but fail to modulate their voices cor- 
rectly. The case of Casper Hauser is cited to show that even when 
hearing and intellect are intact speech may not develop when it is 
not permitted to be heard. Noire's 15 \ conception is that man, like 
the ape and others, very early acquired a language of gestures or 
attitude, and of gestures accompanied by sounds. Savages accom- 
pany their speech with gestures. Noire notes three kinds of 
sounds such as: I. Calls of allurement or summons. 2. War 
cries to dismay and to assemble. 3. Warning calls among social 
animals. In these are the subsoil of human speech. 

Human speech was a series of cries, each a sentence in itself 
without syntax and limited to the simplest of animal wants. They 
are not the same in all languages nor are they numerous, but by 
a series of remarkable devices, which are never the same in two 
different tongues, nations have built upon these roots all the 
structure of vocal expression whether stately or cumbrous. 
Words may have different meanings in different tribes and words 
may be borrowed from another race, retaining or altering their 
original sense. In English the borrowed words are from the 
widest different sources and make up the bulk of the language. 
Languages are constantly altering, whatever the status of the 
people, either by advance or degeneration. Onl" dead languages 
stand still. 

Hutson 20 says that speech began in the necessities and gratifi- 
cation of man's association with his fellow man. No doubt by far 
the original vocabulary found in any family or tribe sprang di- 
rectly from mimicry of natural sounds heard from the. immediate 
environment. Hence there is a measure of truth in all the theo- 
ries in the part origin of speech being based on sound. There is 
sense in what has been ridiculed as the "ding-dong" theory, also 

19 Die Welt als Entwickelung des Geistes, Ludwig Noire, Ch. IX, part III, 

Leipsic. 

20 Charles Woodward Hutson, The Story of Language, 1897. 



232 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

in the "pooh pooh" theory. The ring of metals, the clash of 
weapons, the cry of animals, the song of birds, the whistling of 
the wind, the spontaneous ejaculation of man himself had all 
their share in the formation of primitive languages. 

Among animals we note the sign, the sound and the intonation 
or louder sound. These have developed into human gestures, 
human speech and human emphasis. In the Chinese language 
intonation is as important as mere sound. Mimicry is unques- 
tionably the primary basis on which all these modes are formed, 
and diversity of surroundings and anatomical differences make 
language diversity. According to Henry Drummond, language 
consists in six elements. 

1. Emotional exclamation or gesture sounds. 

2. Imitative sounds. 

3. Conventional symbolic sounds. 

4. Varied combinations of these in articulate speech. 

5. Figurative use of concrete terms to express abstract ideas 
and, 

6. Grammatical corrections, late in development. 

The first sounds were probably made up of the closest con- 
sonants and most open vowels and confined to merely physical 
concepts. All intellectual and moral ideas found expression by 
means of the figurative use of words that had originally a phys- 
ical meaning only. 

. The necessity of communication originated language. It also 
facilitates thought, but this had little to do with its origin. Diplo- 
mats claim that by means of language they are as often enabled 
to conceal thought as well as to communicate it. 

Food, drink, shelter, protection against dangerous animals, 
and the care of helpless offspring were man's first needs. For 
these intercourse and community of action were needed. Ges- 
ture, posture, grimace and utterance were necessarily the earliest 
modes of communication and probably long continued in use to- 
gether, and still are used with other modes. There are said to 
be tribes that cannot understand one another's language in the 
dark. Cries, exclamations, and imitations of the sounds in nature 
must have made up the first modes of utterance. These would 
soon become fixed in meaning and make the beginning of speech. 



LANGUAGE. 233 

The Aryan tongues have been traced back to roots of one syl- 
lable. The Chinese and some other tongues still consist of such 
roots. 

As among the Ponca and other tribes of Indians, there is a 
tendency to multiply uselessly such things as a verb that would 
denote whether game were killed accidentally or purposely, by 
shooting or otherwise, and whether by bow and arrow or gun ; the 
form of the verb would also express the person, number, gender 
and case of the object. This gives a clew to the crude origin of 
speech in making a word that was used upon one occasion that 
would exactly express the whole of a certain event. As exactly 
the same kind of event might happen but once in a million times, 
there would be a useless cumbering of the memory in the storing 
up of such words. Advance would consist in inventing words 
that would avoid all this difficulty. 

Savages invent names for not only near but distant relations 
such as the cousin of the wife's mother's aunt, often a single 
word is sought for to express such relationship, and with the 
inevitable result of overcharging the memory with useless terms. 
This is paralleled by their inclination to give separate names to 
multitudes of acts that are nearly alike, hence their jargons have 
to undergo pruning by the natural selection of such terms as can 
be better remembered with the additional grouping of names by 
acts and things that appear to resemble one another. 

In some tribes every river, tree, hill, deed or sound would be 
named if possible, and where rivers, trees, hills, are scarce this 
might be done, but when a change of location occurs to a place 
where trees, rivers and hills are many there is likely to grow up 
names for groups of objects, the abstractions of ''a river," or "the 
hill," etc. Children also invent languages and then forget them, 
and demented persons do the same. ''The Tasmanian has no 
general terms, the New Caledonian is unable to understand such 
primary ideas as 'tomorrow' and 'yesterday,' and the speechless 
child has not yet reached the level of intelligence of the dog or 
elephant." 21 Swearing is merely a survival of the growling of 
the beasts to intimidate enemies or overcome prey, so that oaths 
have an instinctive origin and the ability to swear, after a brain 

21 Sayce, The Primitive Home of the Aryans. 



234 TIIE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

injury has sometimes destroyed all other means of expression, 
shows how deeply rooted is this growling or threatening pro- 
pensity in the organic structure of the brain. 

Pollock- 2 regards the first sound of the infant, "m-m," often 
repeated, generally indicates that the child wants something. 
"Ba-ba" repeated indefinitely is a general demonstrative standing 
for any object, as himself, another, and so on. The expulsive 
labial "ba" seems to point out an object with the lips^ the "m-m" 
points within as in sucking. In the baby evolution of speech 
words are first vaguely uttered without definite meaning, and 
finally with definite meaning as "mamma," "papa," "dada," etc. 

To illustrate how those of the old metaphysical school could 
fail in noting facts and drawing inferences, Adam Smith, Con- 
dillac and Locke say that a child calls every man papa or every 
young man "Charley," or something similar, hence proper names 
were the first names, and Liebnitz says that general terms were 
the first words, as children call every person man, and use fre- 
quently such words as thin, plant, animal. Noire is correct in 
combatting this with the fact that the child is limited to a few 
sounds and a limited sensory impression, neither special nor gen- 
eral names are attempted, but sounds, as with the savage, asso- 
ciated with a few recurring impressions, and whether they may 
later acquire a special or general meaning, as a concrete or ab- 
stract expression, the mere sound at first attaches to a certain 
recollection and subsequently may be made to include only one 
or very many objects. As Noire puts it, the child's activity is at 
first one of connecting matters that often occur with some one 
word that is at his disposal, only later does it learn to classify and 
subdivide, as when it hears that this is a river, and that is a river, 
etc. Language designated by its first words those objects that 
were the most striking and the most interesting to man, and pro- 
ceeded then by the help of those words to generalize, that is, to 
attach similar words to similar things. The marked importance 
of some object which constantly occurred in some particular iso- 
lated form naturally must have led to attaching a particular name 
to the object, so proper names belong to the oldest words of 
humanity. The roots from which the words of today have risen 

- Popular Science Monthly, XIII, p. 588. 



LANGUAGE. 235 

originally denoted definite acts. But considering the changes 
constantly undergone by words, these roots need not have the 
same meaning as at first. Personal things of frequent recurrence 
are fixed in words by the child, transient acts make the child cry or 
laugh instead of speak. The names of individuals were the 
earliest words, and this is how man is able to fix the particular 
and to raise it to the general concept. 

Germany, like France, has a linguistic division in low German 
in the lands north of the cross line, high German south of it. 
Holland uses a Flemish form of low German. Belgium is divided 
between the Flemish and Walloon. The German of Switzerland 
is encroached upon by French and Italian. Denmark, Norway 
and Sweden are peopled by Scandinavian branches of the Ger- 
manic race. Only in the north is the non-Aryan race called the 
Lapps. 

Latin, in the course of time, changed into Italian, Spanish, 
Portuguese, Provencal, French, Wallachian and Roumansch, and 
Latin again with Greek, Celtic, Teutonic and Slavonic languages 
together, and with the ancient dialects of India and Persia all 
must have sprung from the Aryan or Indo-European family of 
speech. 

Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac are but impressions of one com- 
mon type of Semitic origin. Miiller thinks the Aryan and Semitic 
are the only families of speech. Add to these Turanian dialects 
of the nomad races of Central and North Asia, the Tungusic 
Mongolic, Turkic, Samoyedic, and Finnic, and a convergence is 
shown to one common source according to Miiller, but other phil- 
ologists see support for the polyphyletic origin of languages in the 
radical differences of these families, the Aryan, Semitic and Tu- 
ranian. The Aryan languages are : I. Hindu : composed by the 
dead Sanscrit, the Hindu and Cingalese of Ceylon ; II. Iranian : 
the dead Zend and the Persian; III. Celtic: Welsh, Irish, 
Gaelic and Manx ; IV. Italic : dead Latin, Italian, French, Span- 
ish, Portuguese; V. Hellenic: dead ancient Greek and modern 
Greek: VI. Teutonic: English, Dutch, Frisian, classed as low 
German, Scandinavian languages, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, 
Norwegian, whlie modern German has developed from the ancient 



236 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Teutonic ; VII. Slavonic is divided into Russian, Polish and Bo- 
hemian. 

Naus, a ship, is common to both Sanscrit and Greek, whence 
the word nautical. Equus in Latin is pronounced like aswas of 
Sanscrit both words meaning horse. 

The names India and Hindu are from the Sanscrit Sindu 
(river), the country of the seven rivers. The Persians changed 
s into h, as they did in all cases, and the word became Hindu, 
which the Greeks adopted, but dropped the h and passed it to the 
Romans as India. 

Accident may pass a phrase into general use. When Benjamin 
Franklin in Paris heard of General Washington's retreat in 1776, 
he exclaimed, "Ca ira," or "all will come right in the end," and 
later in the French revolution it became part of the words of a 
song, and still later Ca ira was the name of a French battleship. 

The language of the law among English speaking people .is 
mainly Norman-French, and the court crier who opens court with 
"Oh yes," may not know that it is a corruption of Ovez, which 
in some cases has been changed to its English equivalent, by order 
of the judge, into "Hear ye." 

As an example of survivals of languages, Canadian French is 
eighteenth century French, and the language spoken by the moun- 
taineers of Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia is that of England 
of three hundred years ago, a dialect of which many words were 
in use in Chaucer's day, and the ideas of these primitive people are 
in many cases like those of such very old English times. The 
Irish dialect is essentially the pronounciation of old-time English, 
when the vowels had the continental value mixed with some more 
modern English sounds. 

English itself is a mixture of the ancient continentallv pro- 
nounced words with dialect corruptions, which account for the 
varying pronunciations of vowels, as a in father and rather, and 
its neglect in tear and fear, etc. 

Dumb animals cannot be denied thought; they do not even 
analyze consciously their impressions, yet they study conditions 
to advantage, make up their minds to act offensively or defen- 
sively without a word; the infant does pretty much the same; 
so do the deaf and dumb. So logic does not depend upon words, 



LANGUAGE. 237 

as Mill claimed; on the contrary logical inferences may be vastly 
nearer the truth before words are used. Hobbs stated, "truth 
and falsity have no place among such living creatures as do not 
use speech." Of course he would regard man alone as the speak- 
ing animal. The fox and wolf resort to subterfuges, and dogs 
and cats know that playing is not in earnest. 

Addison knew his inability to converse, though a great writer. 
Said he. "I have nine pence in my pocket, but I can write you a 
check for a thousand pounds." Garrick said of Goldsmith, "He 
writes like an angel and talks like poor poll." 

It is a pernicious idea, suggested by Max Miiller, that ideas 
depend upon words. The superiority of the modern method of 
object teaching disproves it, for the senses may. know a thing 
better, you may understand objects better by seeing, feeling, etc., 
rather than by description. 

Words may indicate things, but first and foremost you must 
understand what these things are, what the words mean, showing 
that understanding precedes words. Then, again, a man may 
think one thing and say another. 

We read facial expression unconsciously, the play of the mus- 
cles of the face in smiles, sadness, animation we interpret without 
analysis, without resolving each appearance into its composite 
units, and so we read faces as we would hieroglyphs, each entire 
expression stands for itself, nor do we say to ourselves this indi- 
cates grief, this joy, for the interpretation is swifter than words, 
and so words are not in such cases needed for thought. As in 
the case of Gambetta, thinking could be facilitated by speaking, 
and it often occurs with others that the act of speaking appears 
to bring a flow of ideas, sometimes writing does the same thing, 
and excitement may also increase the ability to think, act or speak, 
though it may also confuse ideas, and those unaccustomed to 
writing or speaking much are not helped to think more clearly. 
Habit and aptitude has much to do with such matters. On the 
other hand, great thinkers have been reticent or had poor deliver- 
ies. Sir John Hunter could express himself with difficulty, and 
yet his researches added greatly to our knowledge, while the most 
voluble elocutionist may have an empty head. Napoleon re- 
garded orators as mere manufacturers of phrases. Cuyler asks 



238 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

what is eloquence but truth in earnest? Or its semblance, might 
have been added, for one can be as earnest in lying as in truth 
teaching, or may be energetically mistaken. 

One may prate of things glibly and be unable to apply the 
words practically. A parrot-like repetition of the contents of a 
book may be associated with utter inability to understand the sub- 
ject memorized. Words are often learned and meaning often 
neglected, as when songs and phrases in a foreign tongue are 
committed to memory. My German teacher believed that God 
made languages. A frightful charge against the deity. 

Miiller says that "if you wish to assert that language has vari- 
ous beginnings you must prove it impossible it could have had 
a common origin." Ignoring the bad logic in the remark, we can 
reply that while Aryan, Semitic and Turanian families have suf- 
ficient unlikeness to warrant the idea of separate origin of these 
tongues from which the others descended, and as for coincidences 
in evolution, like causes producing like effects, could enable inde- 
pendent development, and in exclamations and emotional lan- 
guage generally similar organs and environment is likely to 
produce similar conditions as to gestures, grimaces and a few 
words. But while all Aryan languages had a similar origin, the 
Semitic and Turanian are not traceable to any Aryan origin. As 
evidence that language is not necessarily race, Hutson cites the 
fact that Jews speak all languages but the original Hebrew. 

Hutson 23 says language began with positional grammar. Just 
as children put two or three words together, so races use the full 
sentence structure. The relation of words to each other may be 
expressed by position, by intonation, by inflection and by con- 
nectives. In a few tongues positional grammar alone prevails. 
Chinese use both position and intonation. In that language ta 
means great, greatness, or to grow, or very much, or very, accord- 
ing to its position. One word may also determine the precise 
meaning of another. In Chinese jin means man, and tu crowd, so 
jin-tu is a crowd of men. The next step was for the determina- 
tive to undergo phonetic decay and become a mere suffix. Thus 
in Burmese the plural is formed by to and in Finnish by t. 

23 Hutson, Op. Cit. 



LANGUAGE. 239 

Some tongues showed a preference for prefixes. The vowel 
inflection of the Semitic is another step, the interior change of a 
word to denote meanings. Next came mixture of words with lost 
identity, broken into short forms. This originated in external 
inflection and characterizes the Aryan languages. The next step 
was the gradual wearing away or abandonment of inflections and 
the use in their places of similar connections on which stress is to 
be laid, but which act as. stepping stones from idea to idea. Many 
languages show partial advance in several of these directions and 
are not bound to any particular system, though one system may 
predominate. 

Multiple declensions, conjugations and irregular verbs are due 
to the mixture of inflections of several languages. Philologists 
now admit that conjugations, declensions, etc., originally existed 
as distinct words that have since then become joined together. 
Languages that are most symmetrical and complex are lower than 
irregular, abbreviated and bastardized languages, through the 
fusion of various conquered, conquering or immigrant races. 
Whitney 24 holds that conjunctions are as a class the words of 
latest development in a language. 

Tasman spoke of the Australian aborigines as a malicious and 
miserable race of savages in 1642, and the North Australian lan- 
guage upon being recorded w r as regarded as "refined." The verb 
presents a variety of conjugations expressing nearly all the words 
and terms of the Greek. There is a dual as well as a plural form 
in the declension of verbs, nouns, pronouns and adjectives. The 
distinction of genders is not marked ; adverbs are declined by 
terminational inflections. There are four words for the elemen- 
tary numbers 1, 2, 3, but four is two-two, five is two-three, etc.; 
they have no idea of decimals, and have a great many dialects. 
The Australian savage language is regular and simple, In keeping 
with its poverty of ideas. The Spanish language is probably the 
most beautiful, resonant, inflexible of any of Latin descent. But 
what is there in the Spanish language? The inquisition in de- 
stroying thousands of thinkers in Spain, both male and female, 
helped to fix and impoverish Spanish tongues and brains. 

Language has too often deranged thought, introduced confu- 
24 German Grammar, p. 174. 



240 THE EVOLUTION OF MAX AND HIS MIND. 

sion where the deaf and dumb have thought more clearly. Berke- 
ley said that words were often impediments to thought. In many 
cases they convey wrong impressions, may be false symbols, or 
may choke intellectual processes by their inadequacy. Huxley 
taught that, owing to so many misnomers in botany and zoology, 
the sooner you forgot the original derivation of many names the 
better. Attaching importance to the superficial indications of a 
name in science has repeatedly misled where later knowledge 
shows that the original application of the name was a mistake. 
Lord Bacon remarked that "words mightily entangle and pervert 
the judgment." 

The gradual changes incurred by words in the course of their 
evolution may cause their origin to be lost, as when a dialect mis- 
pronounces a word, differently from what it is spelled, another 
dialect change occurs and a few such mutations make a word 
wholly unlike its original. 

The Cherokees use vowel sounds in words that do not require 
the mouth to be closed, but in such words as Chicamauga, Chika- 
hominy, death or blood is indicated, so that with labials in which 
the mouth is closed in forming a word there is a somber meaning 
in their language. This is equivalent to affirmatives in many 
languages being formed by open-mouthed words, as yes, yea, aye, 
oui, while non, nay, nein are lingual and dental. 

There are old words which survive with restricted meanings, 
for instance, in old English hike meant warm, but the two words 
joined have passed into use as "luke-warm," and seldom mean 
other than moderately warm water, neither cold or hot. 

Buffetier becomes corrupted into beef eater, as a name for the 
guards of the London Tower, and Max Miiller notes that many 
old tavern signs contributed to corruption. A sign board was 
originally a picture of a plume of feathers, and became, when 
spelled on a later sign "plum and feathers." A St. Catherine's 
wheel became a cat and wheel. The Boulogne gate became 
known as Bull and gate, "God encompasseth us" was turned into 
goat and compasses. 

The Yankton and Sisseton tribes of the Sioux nation were put 
upon separate reservations and after ten years dialect differences 
were noted in one tribe having changed m to n in many words, 



LANGUAGE. 24 1 

as words like the Spanish Don differ from the Portuguese Dom. 
The Phrygians, a cross between ancient Aryans and Greeks, 
changed m into n in their word terminations. 

Curfew is a corrupted contraction of cover fire. According 
to Rawlinson 25 the names Europe and Asia signify west and east, 
they were Semitic terms passed to the Greeks through the Phoeni- 
cians. 

Sunday is from the Saxon Sunna doeg, also Sun's doeg, corre- 
sponding to the Hebrew Shabbath. 

Monday is Saxon Monan doeg, or Moon's day. Monath was 
new moon. 

Tuesday, Tuisco the German Tuisto, the son of Terra, the 
earth. In some dialects Dings dag or things day, to plead, at- 
tempt, cheapen. 

Wednesday, from Woden or Odin, the Hercules or War god. 

Thursday from Thor, the thunderer, the god of storms. 

Friday from Friga, the Venus, and the most revered of god- 
desses of the Danes and Saxons, the wife of Woden and the 
mother of Thor. 

Saturday, Seater, as Saturn represents time. 

The ancient Saxons, like the American Indians, named people 
after animals. Hengist and Horsa mean horse in old Saxon. 

Tartar is a general name for general tribes in Asia. 

Thing, tinga, to speak, originated Thingvalla, Althing, the 
judicial and legislative assembly of Northmen. 

Max Miiller accounts for the changes of tree names between 
certain Aryan countries by migrations of people from a country 
of fir trees, to another region abounding in oak trees, which they 
called by the original name fir, and later beeches onlv being seen, 
the name fir was still used to name them, so that fir practically 
meant any kind of a tree. Scotch fir is found at the bottom of 
peat-bogs in Denmark, and above this layer are found the com- 
mon oak, then alder, birch and hazel, the beech succeeds the oak. 
The particular prevailing kind of tree was superseded in the 
course of ages and the name of the first kind of trees may be 
transferred to the succeeding kind. The English word fir and the 

H X' tes to Herodotus. Vol. 3, p. 33. 



242 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

German Fohre is quercus in Latin, which, traced to Anglo-Saxon 
is furhj in old high German it is forakah {Pinus sylvestris). But 
in Lombard fereha is mentioned as the name of oak, and Grimm 
gives ferch as oak, blood, life. The Sanskrit dru means wood. 
Gothic trieu tree, used in Greek as oak druys. The Irish darach, 
Welsh derw, mean oak and oak only. 26 So fir came to mean oak 
and another word meaning oak was transferred to beech by the 
change of vegetation in those early days. Sayce 27 says that the 
same word signifying oak in Greek means beech in Latin. 

Phonetic corruption wholly changes a language as vingt con- 
tains the remains of deux and dix, and twenty is from the Gothic 
tvai, tig jus (two decades), the Anglo-Saron tuentig, framed from 
Teutonic materials. The Latin viginti was derived from the 
Sanskrit vinsati. Phonetic corruption is seen in such instances 
as the Bohemian tsi, as pronounced, spelled as del, being the re- 
mains of Sanskrit duhitar, daughter, which means the milker, so 
the duty of the female Aryan child was to care for the cows. In 
auj our d d'hui (French for today "l we have the Latin word dies 
twice as ajour and hodie corrupted into d'hui. This appears like 
a French dialect word with an appended Latin dialect translation, 
similar to the combination luke-warm. Pater in Armenia is 
hayr. Compare the English tear with the French larme. Early 
forms were taer, tehr, teher, taeher, to the Gothic tagr. The 
Anglo-Saxon taeher takes us to dakry in Greek and (d)asru in 
Sanskrit. The French larme is traceable to the Latin lacruma, 
but are lacruma and dakry cognate terms? The Greek dakry 
and Latin lacru differ only in initials and both are derived from 
dak, to bite. Tooth in Sanskrit is dot. Latin dens, Gothic 
tanthus, English tooth, Modern German zahu, Greek odontes, 
and Latin dentes, were varieties of edontes and edentes, the 
eaters. 

The final introduction of the verbs to be and to have, accord- 
ing to Adam Smith, 28 enabled mankind to relieve their memories 
and thus unconsciously to simplify grammar. "To be" is the 

26 Grimm, Worterbuch, S. V. Eiche. Max Miiller's Science of Language, 

Appendix, p. 239. 

27 Sayce, The Primitive Home of the Aryans, p. 477. 

28 Moral Sentiments, Vol. IV, p. 426. 



LANGUAGE. 243 

most abstract and metaphysical of all the verbs. "The complex- 
ity of the North American language is due to the absence of the 
verb 'to be.' " w 

There were multitudes of dialects in England until after the 
Elizabethan age, when great authors appeared and fixed the lan- 
guage to some extent. English spelling was unaltered long after 
the spoken word had become different from its original pronun- 
ciation. The orthography of our time is very different from that 
of Shakespeare's age, and the pronunciation is very different. 30 

French is curious in being inflected in written, and uninflected 
in spoken, speech, as the learned recorded language advanced and 
the unlearned common speech is largely pronounced as it was 
originally without inflections, and even controls the pronunciation 
of the written speech. 

Changes of languages are explained by Miiller to have made 
alterations in the names applied to the constellations of stars in 
the north, known as the dipper. Originally it was called the seven 
sages. Similarly the Jornada del Muerte, or Journey of Death, 
a sandy New Mexican waste, was contracted and corrupted into 
''Horn alley," and supposed to have obtained its name from the 
cattle horns so abundant in that desert, whereas it was the trav- 
eler's mistaken pronunciation of Jornada which sounded to them 
like Hornaliey. Also the famous rotten row of London, like 
Unter den Linden of Berlin, is the fashionable and royal road, 
and is reduced from the original route du roi. 

Ivar Aasen has tried to unite the hundreds of dialects of Nor- 
way in a new language being related as a denominator to the dia- 
lects as numerators. This artificial language has been legalized 
by the starthing and is taught in the Christiania L'niversity. It 
is making inroads upon the Dano-Norwegian official language. 

Old-fashioned pronunciation was Roome, chahey, laelock and 
goold, for Rome, china, lilac and gold, and courteous old gentle- 
men are obleeged instead of obliged, and hand book, an old Saxon 
word, is lately being used instead of manual. j 

Of English one-half of the words in use are Teutonic, of the 

19 Gallatin's Transac, Am. Antiq. Soc. Vol. II, p. 176. 

so Origin and History of the EnglishLanguage, p. 194, G. P. Marsh. 1S92. 



244 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

remaining half four-fifths are from the Latin, and the rest from 
other tongues. 

What makes it likely that iron was not known previous to the 
separation of the Aryan nations, is the fact that its names vary in 
every one of its languages, but there is a name for copper which 
is shared by Latin and Teutonic languages, aes aeris, Gothic ais, 
old high German cr, modern German er-z, Anglo-Saxon ar, 
English ore. Like chalkos of Greece, which originally meant 
copper but came to mean metal in general, bronze or brass, the 
Latin aes also changed from the former to the Jatter meaning, the 
same occurred in the Teutonic language. 

Max Miiller regards language as the most important means 
of determining races apart, though he acknowledges that it has 
its limitations, owing to the intermingling of people great enough 
in any age, and more so in the present. Occasionally both the 
language and civilization of one race have been merged into that 
of another. It affords a working basis from which races can be 
studied, and he places physical and exterior features in a subordi- 
nate relation, such as height, color, diversity of habit, etc. It is 
puzzling to find the word Arya with different meanings attached, 
but it is likely that the word was used, as nearly every race used 
its name, to indicate its superiority over all other people. Each 
tribe fancied itself the only real people, as the Eskimo called them- 
selves Innuit, the people. According to Miiller Arya means lan- 
guage, and the people or the language would naturally be the 
proud title they would arrogate to themselves and their tongue. 
But we find them also spoken of as the ploughmen; this must 
have been a much later name for Aryans, because they were 
known as Aryans before they became ploughmen, and when they 
were herders of cattle and sheep. A name probably given by 
neighboring tribes. The other interpretation of noble, can readily 
be explained as the Sanskrit indication for good family, because 
the Aryans were the ruling classes in India, the highest caste, and 
the names of the people indicated their relative position just as 
Manchu does in China today. 

Each language tends to split into the common and the learned 
divisions. Latin divided thus about the time of the second Punic 
war, when the nation divided into the lettered and the unlettered. 



LANGUAGE. 245 

Dialects may grow into languages and some of these may 
change into dialects* just as tribes cohere into nations and may 
later split up into tribes, and as varieties form species and finally 
families, and genera may degenerate, and some languages may 
undergo arrested development. 

Miiller tells of a missionary in Central America writing down 
the language of seven tribes, compiling a dictionary of all the 
words he could hear. Returning to the same regions after ten 
years, the dictionary was found to have become antiquated and 
useless. Old words had sunk and new words had risen, and the 
language had radically changed. American Indians had never 
united in very large or permanent confederacies, and hence they 
have separate languages for each tribe. 

Among African children language becomes corrupted so they 
are habituated to a speech of their own, and in one generation the 
entire language is changed. The father's tongue becomes that 
of the family and finally that of the clan, but families of the same 
clan may difrer in speech. Class dialects spring up as those of 
servants, grooms, shepherds and soldiers. Even we of today do 
not speak at home as we do in public. 

Latham says : 31 "There are slight differences of speech be- 
tween members of the same family, between villages and towns 
they increase, and they become greater still when there is a dif- 
ference of tribe, clan or nationality. A difference of words or of 
pronunciation is often found among similar people. A Scotch- 
man, Irishman and Englishman may speak the same words, but 
with a difference of tone or accent. When differences reach a 
certain point they constitute dialect, and when two forms of 
speech differ to the extern of mutual unintelligibility, the result is 
two different languages. 

Natural movements of the body, including face and limbs, 
being read and understood by animals, the next step would be to 
repeat or imitate such motions intentionally, to convey a meaning 
to the observer ; thus the horse paws to show that he is impatient 
to start as the dog jumps for the same purpose, and those animals 
look in the direction they wish to travel. Such movements con- 
tain the rudiments of means of communication of thoughts, and 

31 Comparative Philology, R. G. Latham, London, 1863. 



246 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

certainly some appreciation of means to ends and the relation 
of cause and effect must exist to enable this step to be taken, imi- 
tation for a purpose. The brain parts involved in all this would 
be that for recording sight impressions, and the limb and other 
movement centers with any possible intellect center in addition. 
If the impelling motive is for food or sexual, the corresponding 
parts of the brain would undoubtedly be exercised in the volun- 
tary exhibitions of this finally decided upon expression or ges- 
ture-talk. Following this came a developed gesticulation which 
man exhibits in its highest, and which the pointer and setter dogs 
possess in rudimentary degree. Inarticulate speech by sounds 
followed, then articulate speech came and developed the speech 
center of the brain, taking the place of the right arm movements 
it occupied a spot in the left brain between the right hand center 
and the intellectual fore-brain. When writing w r as added to 
man's means of expression, the writing center appeared between 
the hand center and the fore-brain, just over the speech center. 
All in the "symbolic field." 

Language includes signs or speech and speech may be articu- 
late or inarticulate, by words or records, and these may be ar- 
ranged into prose or poetry. 

The earliest equivalent of writing would be the reminder, as 
when an Indian places a row of stones or a pointed stick to denote 
a direction so that another may know what road to take or to 
avoid. 

Notched sticks were the oldest form of mnemonic methods. 
Indians notch sticks for scalps or make a tally of days on a jour- 
ney. Dairymen kept account of milk supplied on a stick for each 
family. The Clog almanac and Exchequer tallies of Great Britain 
are other instances of mnemonic systems. 

A step higher comes the notched stick or knotted string called 
the quippu by the ancient Peruvians, Egyptians and Chinese. 
Rude sketches on stones were the methods that were then adopted 
by primitive men, and as colored earths were used, of course the 
sketches did not last long until the pictures were cut into the rock, 
mere outline markings, and when the earth was rubbed into the 
cut lines the colors have been in some cases preserved for thou- 
sands of years. Some of the imperfections in these scratched 



LANGUAGE. 247 

records can be duo to the pictures being partly cut and partly 
painted, and the earth used in the painting having disappeared. 
Of course multitudes of perishable materials such as skins of ani- 
mals were drawn upon by early men, and we learn that the Picts 
and Scots found in Ireland and Scotland by the Romans were 
tattooed, and their names are derived from that fact. Tattooing 
was sometimes tribal marking, but chiefly it was under priestly 
control and intended to drive away demons and disease. 

Double figures facing outward were put upon the backs. In 
this way the thunder-bird, or eagle, becomes a double-headed 
eagle, resembling that of Russia, Austria, and the "Holy Roman 
Empire." which had its origin in the bas-relief of Hittite sculp- 
ture 32 . 

Picture writing developed with pictures, part pictures and 
symbols to develop ideas, and no matter how highly developed the 
characters might be in pictography they are always representa- 
tives of ideas, ideograms. An attempt was made at first to sketch 
as much of the animal or object as possible, but finally a part of 
the animal, as its foot or head, was found to convey the idea just 
as well, and so the advance was made from pictures to part pic- 
tures, but often these two methods were mixed in practice. 
Eventually more marks that gave a hint of the pictures of part of 
the animal became symbols, just as the letter U could symbolize 
a hoof which stands for the horse. The Aztec pictographs and 
calendars of the Dakota Indians are of this nature. 

Hoffman thinks that primitive man recorded such things as 
most frequently occurred in his struggle for existence. Records 
of his success in hunting notify others of game near, by pictures 
of animals. Boasting was assisted by his rough pictographs. 
Buffalo robes and other skins contain personal exploits of the 
Indians. Sometimes these were drawn on the outside of their 
tents. 

Zodiacal signs are ideograms, the astronomical signs for Mer- 
cury the planet is a symbol degenerated from the picture of two 
serpents twined on a stick, the caduceus of the god Mercury ; 
while the figure standing for Jupiter is a rough sketch of an 

" Wm. Wright, The Empire of the Hittites, p. 68, 1884. 



248 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

arm holding a thunderbolt. Zodiacal signs originated about 
B. C. 700. 

In time man advanced to drawing mythical shapes, such as 
men with animal bodies or heads, or childish hideous pictures to 
represent demons of disease, the gods of rain, snow, seasons and 
other things. Some of these represent things in motion or special 
attributes, and the attempt to draw signs of gestures still further 
aided in the suggestion of subjective ideas, as empty hands or ribs 
indicated hunger, a hand to the mouth meant eating. The Innuit 
of Alaska is good at life-like pictures. The Ojibwas advanced in 
picturing gestures and suggesting abstract ideas by sketch signs. 
Some nations of Europe and Asia went to the "rebus stage/' that 
is, the names of the things pictured were sometimes used in an- 
®ther sense. This rebus constituted sound pictures or phono- 
grams, which Taylor describes as follows : A box with us means 
a blow on the ear, a receptacle, an evergreen, a kind of wood, and 
to name the compass points. Now if a picture of a box on the 
ear were to stand for all these it would be an ideogram changed 
into a phonogram, we would have passed from pictography to 
tone writing. This the Chinese did, and a second character along- 
side the first determined which meaning was to be taken from the 
homophones, or phonograms of similar sounds. 

The Japanese borrowed the Chinese methods and Egyptians 
began where the Americans did, but advanced to taking these 
signs for initial sounds, a step called aerology. 

The character which had been a picture representing an idea 
became a phonogram representing a sound, and phonograms 
may stand for words, syllables or still simpler sound elements 
which may be called letters, and collections of these simple sounds 
of any language make its alphabet. From reminders through pic- 
ture writing to phonetic writing with an alphabet is the course of 
development, nor have we reached the best stopping place, for 
our spelling is practically hieroglyphic and our letter symbols 
have too many sound values, and some have none at all. 

The American Indians used reminders ; they drew expression 
pictures and developed complicated pictography sufficient for the 
writing of real books. Starr thinks that some Mexican and Cen- 



LANGUAGE. 



; 49 



tral American Indians were passing from the use of ideograms to 
phonograms. 

Egyptians began with reminders and pictures, and then com- 
bined the pictures, complex ideograms, which were gradually 
made to stand for sounds, entire words. But as the one sound 
meant so many different things, the picture had to have some kind 
of additional sign or determinant, to enable determination of 
which particular object is meant by the sound the picture repre- 
sents. And some of these characters after aw r hile came to be used 
for almost simple sounds like mu, from mulek, the owl, and if the 
Egyptians had discarded all the other hieroglyphics and used in- 
stead such characters as stood for simple sounds, the problem 
would have been solved, but they could not shake off traditional 
methods so in the latter days of ancient Egypt owing to the dif- 
ferences of methods there was great confusion in writing. There 
were simple ideograms, phonograms standing for words, broken 
down phonograms, some of which represented almost elementary 
sounds, and all of those might appear in one inscription. 

Egyptian characters have been classed as first ideographic or 
hieroglyphic, then hieratic, which was a script symbolizing of the 
hieroglyphics used by priests, but the common people got up 
another script system called the demotic, the subsequent develop- 
ment could have been symbolic and finally alphabetic, which it 
was to a limited extent. 

The Phoenicians learned the art of writing from the Egvptians, 
but usually took only the simplest phonograms, and in this way 
foreshadowed the first alphabet proper. These simple sound 
pictures were yielded by the process of aerology, which simply 
means allowing the picture to stand for the initial of its name, and 
from Phoenicia these initial letters were carried to Cyprus, Greece 
and Rome. Tylor says there was in the old Egyptian picture 
writing a character which meant owl. It was a simple picture of 
a bird, the word owl was mulek, and in time the ideogram be- 
came a phonogram for a syllable mu, the lek being omitted. Still 
later, by aerology, or taking the initial of mu, the character was 
used for the sound m. The Latins and Greeks followed the 
example of the Phoenicians, so when we see the letter M we know 
that it came from the Egyptian picture of an owl's head, the ears 



25O THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

are indicated in the upper angles, and the beak in the lower angle 
of the letter. 

The Roman numerals are pictures of fingers, as their name, 
digits, show, and the reason watch and clock faces give II II in- 
stead of IV is that the method of subtraction by placing a digit 
before the V had not been used at the time of watch and clock 
origin, and so the old method survives by rigid imitation from 
those days. The X denotes the hands crossed and V half of the 
X, and beyond doubt great periods of time elapsed between the 
use of numbers of straight marks and the invention of the symbols 
V and X and the subsequent addition and subtraction values of 
position of digits after and before these. Some claim the V is 
the thumb and fingers of one hand. The Chinese begin with 
digits and cursive corruption has complicated their fours and 
subsequent numbers till ten is reached, which is a rectangular 
cross. The Roman, Arabic -and Chinese admit of the decimal cal- 
culation. Where the toes as well as the fingers were counted, 
as it is likely was the custom of the ancient Gauls, the vigesimal 
system became engrafted, hence the French method of calling 
eighty four twenty, and adding a ten in the case of ninety. Three 
score and ten in old English is based on the same vigesimal sys- 
tem which considered a score as a man with ten fingers and ten 
toes. The Mexican caribs call twenty one man. 

The Chaldean cuneiform numerals were extremely simple, 
consisting of one impress of the graver for each unit, but the 
marks were arranged after a system which could easily have led 
to arbitrary symbols for each numeral after the Arabic fashion. 
Dr. Clay, the Assyriologist of the University of Pennsylvania, 
sketched for me these characters as the Babylonian numerals : 

The original Arabic numerals, it is likely, were just as prim- 
itive, but it occurred to some thinker to arrange the unit marks 
so that a glance enabled them to be counted, even by a more 
artistic arrangement than the Assyrian. If you count the sepa- 
rate marks in the following early Arabic numbers and then com- 
pare the intermediate cursive or rapidly, carelessly written script 
with what preceded and followed in our modern every day figures, 
you get an idea of the evolution of this mode of recording. 

The Arabian numerals came into Europe through the Sara- 



LANGUAGE. 251 

cens. Berbert, near the end of the tenth century, was the first 
who, by traveling into Spain, learned something of Arabian 
Science. A common literary tradition ascribes to him the intro- 
duction of their numerals and of the arithmetic founded on them 
into Europe 33 in the middle ages. 

The ten symbol degenerating into an elongated rectangle and 
then into a cipher o, but the Romans seem to have borrowed the 
X for their 10 from the Arabians, which part of that symbol they 
dropped. The Babylonians developed their large unit mark 
meaning ten into a cipher, just as the Arabians could have first 
prefixed a figure 2 to the 10 mark to mean twenty, a figure 3 for 
thirty, and so on, finally putting a figure 1 before it to denote ten, 
which converted the former digit ten into the modern cipher, and 
set the world ages ahead in ability to compute. 

V w vw wv vw wv wv vw vw 
v V w vw wv vw vw 

V w vw 



o c=> 



1 




":ED555§ 

IZ3LL56S88 ox 

The X in the square evolved from the X between two squares, 
the circle around the X was the rapidly written next step. Final- 
88 Hallam, Literature of Europe in the Middle Ages. 



252 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ly the circle alone was retained by the Arabians, while the Ro- 
mans borrowed the X from them, preceded by the X inside the 
cipher for a long while being used by the Romans till the outer 
circle was dropped. 

As Hoffman says : "It is interesting to notice how similarly 
human minds work in remote places from each other. Given the 
same problems and similar surroundings, we shall find much the 
same result." 

North American Indians began with pictures, then part pic- 
tures and symbols, and were just beginning to think of phono- 
grams. The Chinese began with reminders, then pictures to 
phonograms, the Japanese went a step further and used sound 
characters, each of which represents a syllable, but failed to reach 
the aerology stage of initial letters. The Egyptian began with 
reminders and pictures and passed through phonograms almost 
to letters, which the Phoenicians constructed from the Egyptian 
vantage ground. 

The stages may be restated as reminders, such as the quippu 
pictures or the kind that were put on wampum belts, then com- 
bination pictures, word phonograms, syllable phonograms, letter 
phonograms. 

As various nations and tribes pass through practically the 
same stage of intellectual development, however remote and inde- 
pendent of one another, it is to be perceived that the several stages 
of the pictorial, syllabic and alphabetic representations of thought 
were not contemporaneous, but were developed in different por- 
tions of the world at various periods of time. 

An immense time is between the pictures and the alphabet 
assisted greatly in the step from barbarism to civilization in the 
Mesopotamian valley when the Babylonians had only ideographic 
cursive script, that is, a conventionalized set of marks represent- 
ing words or names of former pictures. 

It was not until the alphabetic characters became separated 
from their syllabic progenitors that the highest civilization be- 
came possible. The employment of a cumbrous syllable and 
ideographic system of recording sound is a hindrance in the de- 
velopment of many forms of progress, as is shown in the culture 
states of many oriental people. 



LANGUAGE. 253 

The discovery of alphabetic characters made possible the 

record and transmission of language and culture in history, liter- 
ature and science, and nothing seems more natural to us than to 
write our thoughts by means of 26 phonograms, the graphic sym- 
bols of the sounds which we call the alphabet. 

Rawlinson says that the Phoenicians resolved speech into its 
elements by looking for some common object with a name the 
initial of which made the sound they wanted to express. In this 
manner the eagle was made the sign for its initial sound akhom, 
and represented A, and other words having a similar initial sound 
were also employed to represent that letter. B was expressed by 
a leg and foot and two other characters. There were four forms 
for T, three for X, for K, for S, for J, for KH and for H, while 
there were two for L or R, which the Egyptians regarded as the 
same. There were thus several sounds for each letter, except 
F and D, which were represented by a single hieroglyph, the first 
by a horned snake and the last by a hand with the palm upward. 3 * 
The letter M is traceable through Roman and Greek to the 
Phoenician, and finally through the hieratic to the linear hiero- 
glyphic owl. 

H came from the Egyptian sieve, a circle with dots which 
degenerated into a square with lines in Phoenicia, and with but one 
middle line in Greece, and in the Roman usage and later Grecian 
the top and bottom of the square was omitted. L is a crouching 
lion. 

Although the alphabetic prototypes existed in the Egyptian 
hieroglyphs, and were by that people unconsciously employed, in 
a certain sense it was not until the Semitic race discovered and 
utilized these characters by acrologically adapting them to their 
own language that the alphabet can be said to have been made. 

The Semitic peoples composed three principal divisions, each 
of which developed letters. Europeans are indebted to the Phoe- 
nicians, and from the highlands of Asia Minor, Aram, came the 
Iranian group of alphabets, which replaced the cuneiform writing 
as a script of the eastern provinces of the Persian empire. To 
the south Semitic type the ancient alphabet of India with its 
numberless descendants must be referred. 
w Taylor. The Alphabet. 



2 54 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 



Europe uses Aryan speech with a Semitic alphabet, and while 
our letters are Phoenician by the Roman letter divisions upon our 
watches we are Babylonian, and our present method of dividing 
time is from Babylon, which was adopted by Hipparchus in the 
second century B. C. Max Miiller further notes that twenty 
shillings to the pound originated in Babylon, and that the ratio 
of gold to silver in ancient Mesopotamia was I to 133/2. 35 

Written speech was first sketches, then marks that stood for 
the sketch or picture, then pure signs or symbols. 

Signs of words, signs of symbols, signs to express the sounds 
of syllables, signs to express the sounds of letters, signs to make a 
once existing letter, such is the order of development of written 
speech. 

Hard stone was incised, soft cut in relief, in wood carved, in 
brick stamped in soft clay, 01 leaves of leather, parchment painted 
with ink brush, or written with pen or quill, wax tablets written 
upon by stylus. Some writing like that of the Jews from right 
to left, others, like that of the Babylonians and Greeks, written 
from left to right, or alternately above downward. 

Assyrian writing became wedge-shaped when clay came into 
use as a writing material, because the marks were impressed with 
the corner of a square-headed implement, the clay afterward being 
baked in the sun or in an oven. In Greece votes were inscribed 
on oyster shells (ostraca), and it was by these votes that banish- 
ment or ostracism was made. 

Language was reduced to writing by accidental development 
and the inducements its advantages held out, but by very slow 
degrees and after millions of blunders, while multitudes of races 
have not corrected their blunders. Even now the largest num- 
ber of languages have produced no literature, and the Phoenician 
inventors of letters did not leave any evidences of their appreciat- 
ing the value of their discovery very highly. We are able to 
translate Egyptian by the chance finding of a stone engraved with 
fourteen lines of Egyptian hieroglyphics and its Greek translation. 
This Rosetta stone remained the small portion of hieroglyphical 
writing upon which ability to translate other inscriptions rested 
until the discovery of the decree of Canopus, another stone. The 
S5 Select Essays, Vol. II, p. 498. 



LANGUAGE. 255 

Rosetta was on hard basalt and the Canopus on lime stone, dated 
at Memphis, March 25, B. C. 196. 

Schleicher, Lottner and Fick studied the Aryan languages 
from a genealogical relationship, but Schmidt' 50 gave them geo- 
graphical significance alone, and instead of a tree branching into 
divisions of the Indo-European stock, he represented the Aryan 
tongues as a wave spreading in concentric circles ever thinner 
in proportion to their distance from the center, or even an oblique 
plane, inclined from Sanskrit to Celtic in an interrupted line. 

When writing became developed it was at first kept secret by 
the priests for their particular use, pretty much as Egyptian and 
other priesthoods have thought it profitable to keep the common 
people ignorant so that more wealth could be frightened from 
them. 

"Scalds" before the general diffusion of writing committed 
matters to memory such as laws, customs, precedents, among the 
Scandinavians, and were living books. After the first half of the 
twelfth century they disappeared, as writing began to be more 
general. 

Book is from the German Buch, originally identical with 
beech, the early books being tablets made of beech wood. Saxons 
and Danes used beechwood for making books. The Saxon name 
for beech was boc, the Danish name was bog, so northern natives 
derive their word book. The Romans used the thin peel liber 
between the wood and the bark. From this is our word library, 
and the French use livre, because the Romans called this peel 
liber, and later applied it to all books, however written. Romans 
rolled up their peelings and called the roll volumen, whence our 
volume. The Roman Senate, wrote edicts on ivory and called 
the plates libri elephanti. 

The methods of conveying ideas by symbols are divided into 
metonomy, synechdoche, metaphor and enigma. 

Metonomy, as when a blood-stained club signifies an enemy 
killed, a crescent to denote the month, as among the Ojibwas. 
The Dakotas represent battle by two arrows pointing to each 
other. [Metonomy substitutes one thing for another. 

Synechdoche, the substitution of part of an object or idea 

38 D. Pozzi, Aryan Philology, 1879. 



256 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

for the whole, which is common in Indian picture writing, as 
when a horse shoe signifies horse, a turkey's foot for the turkey, 
hoof prints of other animals for the animals themselves, small 
claws for the black bear and large claws for the grizzly. To go, 
to come, among the Ojibwas, is represented by the soles of the 
feet. To run, with Mexicans, Egyptians and Hittites, was ex- 
pressed by pictures of legs in the act of running. A human head, 
among the Indians, with animal or other object below, indicated a 
personal name. 

Metaphor. The Egyptian mother was represented by a vul- 
ture betause this bird was said to nourish its young with its own 
blood ; a king was a bee because this insect was subject to 
monarchial government ; a priest was a jackal to indicate his 
watchfulness over sacred things. 

Enigma. The Egyptian Ibis represented Thoth Hermes, the 
god, owing to supposed mystical connection between the bird and 
the deity. A lotus stood for upper, and a papyrus lower, Egypt. 
A sphinx, which was a man's head on a lion's body, in Egypt rep- 
resented royalty, or intellectual power, combined with physical 
strength. The prevailing idea of gods and kings. 

Abstract ideas. Ideographs of that kind were frequent and 
in some tribes more than others. Meat in a pit signified plenty, 
as the Indians covered their meat in caches when abundant. Pic- 
tures of ribs or a bar across the abdomen meant hunger. A 
symbol like our figure three indicates cramps in the stomach or 
fatal sickness. Crossed pipes denote peace. 

In Egypt the sign for a year was a palm. Ojibwas indicate 
spring by trees with buds. Winter is a curved line with zig- 
zags falling from it for snow. Taylor 37 says out of the Semitic 
cuneiform arose the Turanian photo-Medic syllabary, and on the 
other hand the alphabet of the Aryan Persians. The latter was 
solved acrologically, 38 and retains images of the syllabic writing 
out of which it sprung. 

Linear Babylonian consists of ideograms with pictorial re- 
mains. Eater the arrow or wedge-shaped character came, and 
convention obliterated the pictures. An example is in the Assyr- 

87 Taylor, Op. Cit.. Vol. I, p. 39 

ss Sayce, Science of Language, Vol. I, p. 321. 



LANGUAGE. 257 

ian cuneiform character Kha, a fish, from the older Babylonian 
sketch, which looks something like a fish, while in Linear Baby- 
lonian the fins and the tails are more distinct and resemble the 
outlines of a fish as drawn by the Ojibwas of the present day. 
The city of Nineveh was originally a collection of fishermen's 
huts, so a fish is drawn in an inclosure and represents Nineveh. 

Taylor suggests that some dyssyllabic Akkadian words were 
simply worn down by phonetic decay into monosyllables, which 
became the phonetic values of the characters. Suppose we util- 
ized the childish da, de, di, du, dy, into combinations of dodo, 
dido, dady, etc., the original syllables having no value by them- 
selves. The original Babylonian is traced to the twenty-seventh 
century B. C, and the oldest Akkadian, by Sayce, to 3000 B. C. 

Another syllabary called the Hittite is traced by Major Con- 
dor ;; ' as non- Semitic, and, like the Tartar or Turkic tribes, the 
Hittites were first referred to by Sargon about 1900 B. C. 

The names of persons were originally single, as in Hebrew 
bible geneologies, also in Egypt, Syria, Persia, Greece, Italy and 
among the Celts and Teutons. All such names were originally 
significant, usually of some circumstance of birth or some senti- 
ment, and among the North American Indians they were often 
indecent, and a new name might be imparted at any time, as 
among the Cheyennes a cut-off finger caused one to be called 
tama-atse, which was afterwards changed to mimisit, on account 
of his big voice. 

The Roman named after occupations, as potsherd, or a pecu- 
liarity, as a long nose, and many Celtic and Teutonic names 
brought in the deity Gottfried, Godwin, or spirits, as Elfic (elf 
king). 

Later the Romans were divided into clans, or gentes, subdi- 
vided into families. Thus in the gens Cornelia were the families 
Scipiones, etc. Each citizen had three names, the prsenonmen, 
or first name, which was the individual name, the clan or second 
name and the family name was third, the cognomen, and there was 
a distinctive name. The Publias Cornelias Scipio was of the 
Cornelia gens and Scipiones family, and Publius was his indi- 
vidual, or what is now called his Christian name. The agnomen 
39 Journal-Trans., Vict. Inst., 1889. 



258 THE EVOLUTION OE MAN AND HIS MIND. 

or honorary title of Africanus was added for his "carrying the 
war into Africa" against the Carthaginians. Lselius Cornelius 
Scipio Asiaticus was his brother. The Senate granted German- 
icus to the elder Drusus and his posterity. 

Mythological childishness is associated with names by primi- 
tive peoples, thus the American Indian may know that his grand- 
father's name was Running Wolf, but as he has known nothing of 
his great-grandfather's personality except that he was called 
Raccoon, that savage is likely to imagine that he descends from 
a real raccoon animal. 

The English and Welsh registry lists show that Smith is the 
commonest name in the kingdom, being one of seventy-three of 
the population. The ancient armorer was a skilled mechanic and 
proud of his occupation as an armor smith ; he ranked with silver 
smiths, all of whom naturally adopted the names of the occupa- 
tions by command of feudal barons who could trace their sub- 
jects better for taxation purposes through compelling them to 
adopt family names, or John the Smith and Robert the Clerk, 
eventually came to be known as such, and the confusion was 
added to by the old custom of taking as a surname Johnson or 
Smithson, Robertson, Clarkson, according as the son was named 
after the father's first name or his occupation, with the affixed 
word son. Jones is commonly Welsh, and is the same as John. 

Analysis of the 1855 registry shows among the fifty common- 
est names that 34 per cent are named from occupations, 30 per 
cent are named from corrupted first names by their phonetic cor- 
ruption, abbreviation, or the affix son and sometimes with all of 
these changes. Eight per cent are named from localities, and 8 
per cent from colors. 

The commonest names in England, from the registry of 1855, 
are as follows : Smith, Jones, Williams, Taylor, Davies, Brown, 
Thomas, Evans, Roberts, Johnson, Wilson, Robinson, Wright, 
Wood, Thompson, Hall, Green, Walker, Hughes, Edwards, Lewis, 
White, Tanner, Jackson, Hill, Harris, Clark, Cooper, Harrison, 
Warden, Martin, Baker, Davis, Morris, James, King, Morgan, 
Allen, Moore, Parker, Clarke, Cook, Price, Phillips, Shaw, Ben- 
nett, Lee, Watson, Griffiths, Chester. 

The first is the most numerous, there being one Smith in 73 of 



LANGUAGE. 259 

the population, the Chesters, Roman for camps, being- one in 551. 

Campbell of Scotland is plainly from campo bello of Italy, or 
beautiful country, and the same meaning is contracted into Beau- 
champ, from beau champs of the Xorman French. In Spain the 
son inherits names from both parents, or may choose which one 
he pleases. Hereditary surnames began in England in the four- 
teenth century. Many adopted names from localities, and pre- 
fixed d or o as John o'Groat. Some were named from animals, 
probably from coats of arms of the barons they followed, many 
from occupations, and among all of these are obsolete words the 
original meaning of which has been lost. Smith meant to smite 
in English, and included wheel-wrights, carpenters, masons, and 
smiters in general, the German Schmidt included armorers. Per- 
sonal characters gave names as colors, brown, black, white, green 
and red, the latter was read, reed, or reid, in old spelling. Alfred 
meant all peace. Patience, Prudence, Faithful, Thankful were 
at one time popular. Formerly an act of parliament was required 
to change names, but in England it is now decided that one can 
change his name at will. Americans adhere to the old English 
custom of seeking legal sanction for changing names. 

The ruder population of Europe continued to use single names. 
There were a few surnames in England before the Xorman inva- 
sion. As many had the same name a further designation was 
needed. Christianity displaced old heathen names by names 
from the bible, and sometimes to save trouble whole companies 
were given the same name in baptism. At first it was not com- 
mon to transmit the surname from father to son, but in the 
twelfth century persons of distinction took surnames and of 
course it became fashionable to adopt them. Henry I. had a 
natural son upon whom he conferred the name Fitz Roy, or son 
of the king, fitz being a corruption of fils. Petrovitch, Ivano- 
vitch has the same value. Mac is Gaelic Scotch and Irish for son, 
and O is Irish for grandson and the Welsh prefix ap, and they 
even use a string of aps, as ap Griffith, ap David, ap Jenkin, ap 
Hugh, ap Morgan, ap Owen. Griffith Williams was a means of 
stating that Griffith was the son of William, from which origi- 
nated many names ending in s. Adamson, Johnson, were also 
40 Lower, English Surnames, 1842, and Ferguson, same, 1858. 



26o THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

used until finally fixed in a family. Instead of John, the son of 
Adam, and Adam the son of John grew up John Adamson, the 
family surname, and thus many Christian names became sur- 
names. 

There is no w in the Anglo-Saxon or Maeso-Gothic alphabets, 
hence such words as "Villiam vat of it," and veil for well. The 
aw sound of a is also from old French, but some words undergo 
strange mutations, as vases pronounced wahses and vestcoats wes- 
kits. There is no w in French and so the Frenchmen pronounce 
Washington Vashington, or by extra effort Guashington, and his 
Guilliame we render into William. 

Parallel to the word Hindu passing to the Greek through 
Persia, and thence to us with the H left ofr, the London cockney 
dialect is said to be an attempt to imitate the Norman French by 
omitting the h, a habit assigned to Greek cockneys who passed it 
to all the Latin tongues, thence through French it found its way 
to Whitechapel and Threadneedle streets, and to Windsor and 
Buckingham palaces. And apparently by way of revenge the 
common people balanced matters by putting an h on every exposed 
vowel. Hedge originally meant edge, or boundary. Hear was 
ear, hearing was earing. Hall was a place for all, and the ac- 
cepted omissions of h are 'onerable, 'umble, 'umor, 'eir, 'are, 'ow, 
'onest, 'otel, 'ostler, 'arbor, 'oo, 'andiron. 

If you are right handed the speech faculty is situated in your 
left brain a little forward of the upper part of your ear. How 
do we know this? By the very simple fact that an injury of that 
part of the brain causes loss of the ability to use language. If 
you are left handed the speech centre is in your right brain. This 
may be accounted for by gesticulations, mainly by the right hand, 
having preceded vocal language millions of years, and the speech 
faculty was grafted upon right hand gestures, the centres for 
which are over the left ear and above and behind the speech 
centre. This part of the brain is called the symbolic field because 
in that region is the control of the voice in articulate speech and 
in intelligent gesticulation. Some of this association of speech 
and gesture centres is evident in the motions made while speak- 
ing, such as drumming or playing with the fingers, scratching 
the head to help the thought and even certain monotonous and 



LANGUAGE. 26t 

inappropriate arm movements while talking. One will wave his 
right or left arm up and down and sideways. In writing the 
child moves the tongue as do some when cutting with scissors. 

Speech helps to develop the fore brain, and it is the left fore 
brain that is the more important intellectually, just in front of 
the speech centre, and as the majority of people are right handed 
so the left fore brain in association with the left speech centre is 
connected with the left brain centre for the right arm, hand and 
fingers that are used most in gestures. 

As the education in speech depends upon hearing and the eye- 
sight, the latter especially for reading, then both the arm and 
speech centres in the symbolic field must receive nerve connections 
irom the optic and auditory centres. Where writing is more 
the habitual means of expression then the right fingers center in 
the left brain is better developed, as in the case of Addison and 
Goldsmith. But when the speech faculty is well developed there 
must be an organic basis for it in the better construction of that 
particular part of the brain. 

Laura Bridgman, the blind deaf mute, thought in terms of 
gesture and in her dreams she moved her fingers in sign words, 
hence her fingers and arm centres coupled with face centres for 
expression were main thought regions in her brain. In others 
with the normal faculties thought is often in terms of the lan- 
guage learned, but not all thought, for the recalling of appear- 
ances can be independent of speech ideas, but many ideas are in 
speech terms, as when one thinks in German or in French, etc. 
It is not necessary that all his thoughts need be in language, many 
of them can be in reading terms, and probably still more in ges- 
ture or expression terms, pictures, heiroglyphs practically. 

Language merely imports the capacity for higher range of 
thought. It is likely that ancestral languages may be more read- 
ily acquired even though not previously heard, because the brain 
adjustment may be such as to favor its acquisition. For example, 
one who had French ancestors brought up in an English envi- 
ronment spoke English excellently, for he had never heard 
French, but when later in life he was among Frenchmen he 
learned that language quickly and easily. As a rule where chil- 
dren are brought up among foreigners the language they hear 



262 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

most is the one they use. It is stated, however, that where Ger- 
man and French are equally spoken the child is inclined to use 
German more, and if English is alternate it will be preferred as 
admitting of quicker thought expression. 

The baby's movements are at first badly regulated, he kicks, 
sprawls and throws his arms, often in the wrong direction when 
he attempts to grasp some objects. He denotes pain and pleasure 
by merely crying and laughing. Little by little the infant regu- 
lates his movements for walking and handling, and acquires the 
ability of pointing at or motioning away persons, denotes pleas- 
ure by words and smiles, and displeasure by shaking his head or 
turning away, and soon he begins to articulate such words as "go 
way," "lemme 'lone," etc. 

An important inference from this is that manual training 
would develop the symbolic field of the brain and afford a basis 
for mental development; where purely linguistic studies would 
tend to create inefficiency by crowding the speech centre with 
symbols that are seldom used, comparable to the differences in 
education that exist between the skilled mechanical engineer and 
the clownish contortionist. The gymnast is not a watchmaker or a 
pianist, nor is the elocutionist an orator. But both elocutionist 
and orator may have undeveloped frontal brains and in their 
intellectual poverty make use of phrases in emotional rather than 
rational ways, depending upon the inability of many hearers to 
discern jingle from sense. 

Nerves concerned in speech meet in the speech centre of the 
brain in the insula operculum, and according to which region, 
whether in front or behind, is injured we may have ataxic aphasia, 
the inability to speak words, though we may remember them, but 
ideas in other terms may remain as in the instance of an inability 
to remember or to say the word milk, though the patient may 
ask for "that white fluid we drink." So there must be a separate 
part of the brain for more generalized ideas than where names 
are stored up, and this accords with C. K. Mills' naming centre 
doctrine. 

And injury of the brain has reduced the words to a few ex- 
clamations, or to such absurd expressions as "saw my leg off," 
a survival of an old college song. 



LANGUAGE. 263 

There may be agraphia or the inability to write words inde- 
pendently of speech integrity or impairment. A patient with 
right sided paralysis could only say "Aye, aye," to every question, 
another only "O, yes," and still another "Toot, toot." He was 
a cornet player. Sometimes there may be word blindness, word 
deafness and complete aphasia in the same person without par- 
alysis. Paraphasia is where the wrong word is used in attempts 
at speaking. If the left tempero-sphenoidal is injured there is 
word deafness, sensory aphasia. 

Speech derangements are of various sorts and assist our 
knowledge of the brain workings. When there is dumbness in 
the course of hysteria the cause can be found in cramp of the 
blood vessels supplying the speech centre at the root of the low- 
est, third frontal convolution, just in front of the ear. The whis- 
pering trouble in hysteria is a partial paralysis of the vocal cords. 
When coughing propels more blood to the head, and the arteries 
in the speech centre are thus filled, then a temporary recovery of 
the voice follows. Hysterical mutism or dumbness sometimes 
comes on during a convulsion. 

The word hearing centre in the left brain extends along the 
upper tempero-sphenoidal convolution at the brain base on a line 
backwards from the forehead behind the upper part of the ex- 
ternal ear. Its injury induces what is called auditory aphasia, or 
inability to recollect words or attach any meaning to them. Para- 
phasia is the disorder of speech where the wrong word is spoken 
and the right one cannot be recalled, an incomplete damage to 
this word hearing centre may be the cause of this difficulty. 

The word speaking centre is in the left brain at the base of 
the third frontal convolution, in front of the ear. Its derange- 
ment prevents words being articulated, though they may remain 
in the memory. The word seeing centre is located in the back 
part of the side of the left brain, extending from the posterior tip 
forward to over the ear, between the angular and cuneus gyri. 

When this region is injured there is inability to recollect 
printed or written words, though the words themselves may be re- 
membered and the ability to pronounce them may remain. 

At the root of the left second convolution behind the temple 
is the motor centre for writing, damage to which will disable 
the person from writing or figuring, even though printed and 



264 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

written characters may be recognized. The artist depends upon 
the integrity of this part for his ability to make pictures. 

Writing is often affected at the same time with motor aphasia. 
That is, when a person is disabled from speaking from loss of 
ability to articulate words he may, also, be unable to write, owing 
to these centres adjoining. 

Trousseau 41 says "the greater number of aphasics are par- 
alyzed in the right hand and cannot write, and if they acquire 
the habit of writing with the left hand it is easy to see they can- 
not trace in writing many more words than they can express in 
speech. 

The world-blind patient may be figure-blind also, and the artist 
would cease to understand his own drawings when the word- 
seeing centre, the angular gyrus, is invaded. Some are able to 
read the figure 3 but not the word three, others have loss of mem- 
ory of certain printed or written letters or words, as the para- 
phasic has for spoken words. Object or mind-blindness is the 
failure to identify objects, and the cuneus gyrus occipital tip or 
hindmost part of the brain is concerned in this trouble. One may 
fail to see with half of the eye toward the nose and half of the 
other eye toward the temple, the outer half of one eye and inner 
half of the other. 

The musical faculty may be retained with aphasia. One case 
could not speak but could sing songs with the words correctly. 

Amimia is the loss of the ability to gesticulate, as to nod or 
shake the head to express yes or no. In paramimia the gestures 
are used wrongly. 

The power of emotional expression outlives that of other fac- 
ulties. 

Echolalia is the repetition of anything said ; this disorder oc- 
curs in some persons. 

Some insane give conventional replies as "very well, thank 
you," with very little other ability retained, and a superstitious 
significance may be attached to a word. The agonizing search 
for a name, word or a number forgotten is called onomatomania. 

Embololalia is the affliction of involuntary putting in mean- 
ingless words or syllables like hemming and hawing. Kussmaul 

11 Clinique Medicale, p. 708. 



LANGUAGE. 265 

tells of a general who put mamma between every three or four 
words. 

Logorrhcea is like the verbigeration of mania, a flow of words. 
Bradylalia is slowness of utterance from depressed functions. 
Stuttering and stammering are faulty regulated speech. In pa- 
retic dementia the speech is slow and stumbling, particularly over 
the letter r, which is difficult to pronounce. 

In terminal dementia there is often a disposition to invent new 
words as the child does, and it is noteworthy that in the infancy 
of man and of the race new words are incessantly invented and 
forgotten as in the condition of destruction of the intelligence in 
the course of dementia. 

The loss of memory of words occurring with advancing age 
or infirmities are first for proper names, special or concrete nouns, 
while abstract nouns and general terms may be well retained ; 
such words as yes and no may be retained when all else is lost, 
and the ability to swear or exclaim is quite persistent, equivalent 
to the growling or snarling of animals. Kussmaul 42 continues to 
be the standard author on the subject, though John Wyllie 43 of 
Edinburgh is a later writer of a good work of reference. 

Chinese has some traces of agglutinations and incipient inflec- 
tion. Ancient Greek had intonation in its accents. The Aryan 
had instances of vowel inflection. Some Aryans and some Sem- 
itic tongues use prefixes. All languages have connectives. All 
languages use positional grammar to some extent. Chinese is 
one syllabled positional and intoning. Japanese is agglutinative 
and positional. Zulu inflects by prefixes. Hebrew inflects by 
affixes to the root. English is both monosyllabic and constructs 
sentences by connectives. English remains to some extent the 
power of combination of the agglutinative stage. Thus we say 
railroad or railway where the French are confined to chemin de 
fer. Steamboat where they say bateau a vapeur, chambermaid 
where they say femme de chambre. The Xorman French curtailed 
this compounding of words, which was going to excess. We see 
the ill effects of this excess in the tendency in German. A few 
words in English show the remains of former inflection which 

42 Kussmaul, Treatise on Disturbances of Speech. 

43 The Disorders of Speech, 1894. 



266 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

English discards. "It is barely possible that all these varieties of 
language formation, the monosyllabic, the agglutinative, the holo- 
phrastic, the inflective by prefix, the inflective by vowel change, 
the inflective by affix, may have sprung from one and the same 
original tongue. They seem, however, to follow race character- 
istics, and they may have originated at different centres in spite 
of the fact that one set of inflected tongues, the Aryan, can be 
reduced to roots of one syllable. One thing is certain, there is a 
constant tendency to word variation in language, and there have 
always been dialects. Whitney has pointed out that each human 
being has a language to himself. His part of the mother tongue 
is not identical with that of any other. Household differs from 
household, tribe from tribe, province from province. From this 
fact with sometimes an added difference in origin, or some his- 
toric happenings, comes the existence of dialect. 

Change in language comes about in six ways : Change in the 
form of words, in their meaning, in the total disappearance of 
words, the loss of grammatical form once had, and the introduc- 
tion of new grammatical forms. Whitney illustrates the first two 
by the Greek word episkopos changed thus in form : Latin epi- 
scopus, French eveque, Spanish obispo, Portuguese bispo, Danish 
bisp, German bischof. Inflected English biscop, English bishop, 
Italian vescovo, while the person meant by the original Greek, a 
mere superintendent of trembling proselytes, has become an ec- 
clesiastical prince, having great revenues and wielding august au- 
thority. 

Phonetic decay attacks vowels and consonants. Phonetic con- 
venience of ease in thinking and speaking have changed language. 
Economy in utterance lies, like gravity, in waiting to pull down 
what tradition or literary prestige cannot build up. Unconscious 
changes in speech are made from generation to generation. Syl- 
lables are shortened, stress changed from one syllable to another,, 
compound words by fusion are made to appear simple, the vowel 
changes called in German Ablaut and Umlaut are developed,, 
words are annexed from other languages, the slang terms pro- 
duced by ignorance or humor are adopted into the language. 
There are variations in intonation even among those speaking the 
same language. A Scotchman seems to an Englishman to be 



LANGUAGE. 267 

always asking questions, because he raises the pitch of his voice 
toward the close of all sentences. 

Grimm's law in that p, b, f, in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, be- 
come in Gothic f, p, b, and in old high German b, f, p. Also, that 
t, d, th, in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit became in Gothic th, t and 
(1. and in old high German d, z, t. Also, that k, g, ch in Latin, 
Greek and Sanskrit become in Gothic k, k, g, and in old high 
German g, ch, k. 

French stress is uniform, and hence intonation is monotonous, 
dramatic verse being sing-song. All structure is the result of 
growth. The capacity of making a noun do duty as a verb : "he 
eyed the man," is a new power for a once inflected tongue. Dia- 
lect construction is the same as language division, separation of 
races, lack of fixity of language owing to being uncivilized, neigh- 
boring tongues, childish delight in playing with language pro- 
duce dialects. Provincial life, lapses, intermarriage, slang also 
make dialects. Many expressions and pronunciations once com- 
mon in England are found now in Ireland, and in Virginia and 
the Carolinas. They are the Elizabethan English, but they died 
out in the England of the Hanoverian kings. 

When dialects drift apart and become separate languages the 
parts that remain are the numerals, pronouns, family relation 
terms and forms of the verb "to be." Likenesses sometime re- 
main thousands of years and across wade continents after all trace 
of the vocabularies have passed away, as the verb "to be" wit- 
nesses. , 

Agglutination varies from a scantiness hardly above the iso- 
lating language, to intricacy approaching inflection. In three 
orders : By simple attachments as with Finns, of holophrastic 
type as in America, and with some vowel inflections and conso- 
nantal change by assimilation, as in Bantu tongues. 

There is a principle of symmetry peculiar to each type of lan- 
guage. That of the monosyllabic is mtonation, though all do not 
have it. That of the Semitic is a wonderful euphonic law of 
vowel change. That of the Aryan is the law of symbolization. 

The Agglutinative tongues of Akkad, of Sumir and the Hit- 
tite confederacy were of undoubted antiquity. The races using 
this type of language, that were not subjected to the influence 



268 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

of civilization, improved their speech by natural processes of evo- 
lution, into approximation either to the holophrastic or to the 
inflective type. The In-nu-it is an instance of one tendency, the 
Australian tribes of the other. The Basque agglutination affixes 
approach inflections. Nor will it do to say that grammatical gen- 
der is found only in the Aryan, Semitic and Hamitic tongues. 
There is something of the sort in several agglutinative languages. 
The holophrastic tends to reduplications. In the Hamitic is the 
embryonic Semitic, a line of development from monosyllables up 
into bilateral and trilateral roots. 

The ancient Egyptian is a low type, the root is unchanged and 
number formations are by affixes. In Semitic there is the highest 
trilateral root system and euphonious vowel interchange. Assy- 
rian had terminal inflections for cases, Hebrew has it for gender 
and number. Arabic has positional grammar like Chinese. The 
Semites were later than the Akkads. Egyptians and Hittites 
were civilized and began their languages at a proper stage of 
evolution*, but it is evident that their tongues had once passed 
through stages identical with those of Basque and Bantu. Aryans 
were still more fortunate. Their language fully developed its 
capabilities before they reached full civil organization and liter- 
ary expression. Kelt, Dane, Norman and Aquitanian gave gifts 
oi blood and language. Through French both language and lit- 
erature made vast gains. French was an analytic development 
of Latin when English was still in the inflected stage. Hence the 
ready triumph of Norman French when in contact with the other 
tongue. It made English even more analytic than itself, and 
then it succumbed to English. Still its literature and its social 
prestige have always largely affected both English literature and 
usages. English is the heir of all these tongues, Latin. French, 
Low German, Scandinavian, Keltic and all other lands and 
tongues are used when necessary to name new things. It is rich 
in idioms, dialects and synonyms. Its serious lack is that there 
is no rational alphabet and that English is very far from being 
consistent with the sound of spoken English. 

Hutson's resume is as follows : Languages are divisible into 
the: 



LANGUAGE. 269 

1. Monosyllabic, each sound by itself and relations of words 
expressed by position and tone. 

2. Agglutinative, where simple sounds combined by mere 
juxtaposition and utterance together form the compound idea. 

3. Holophrastic (telling the whole), where the agglutinative 
plan is carried to the length of putting together in one utterance 
all the ideas it is intended to express. 

4. Inflectional, where the relations of words to one another 
are determined by some change in the form of words. 

5. Analytic, where the synthetic methods having done their 
full work, and a reaction against that system setting in, the rela- 
tions of words to one another are expressed by small particles that 
serve as stepping stones for thought. 

The inflectional is the climax of synthesis. By clashing of 
diverse inflected tongues and by phonetic change and decay lan- 
guage passed from the highly synthetic form of inflected speech to 
easy and simple analytical forms. English, French and Persian 
for instance come in part to resemble the early monosyllabic type. 
It is polished, an instance of survival of the fittest. No human 
being is born with speech, he is born only with the faculty for 
speaking, and must learn to do so from those around him. An 
English child in China learns Chinese ; speech, then, is not innate, 
but acquired, it is social. The child that grows up among wild 
beasts will not speak any language. 

While Greek, German and English agreed in keeping nearly 
the same word for the girl child Thiigater, Tochter and Daugh- 
ter, Latin lost the word and used filia, the feminine for films, 
its word for son. On the other hand, while Latin kept a word for 
father's brother Patruus and another for mother's brother Avun- 
culus, English has kept only the ambiguous word uncle. 

By the process of exuviation from the primitive method of 
naming all relations this throws light on the condensing process 
of one name taking the place of several former words. 

It was Home Tooke who first made the guess that the endings 
of nouns, adjectives and verbs once had an independent life of 
their own. 

In words, says Fred W. Farrar, we find the biological laws 
of ''the struggle for existence, the importance of intermediate 



270 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

types, the perpetuation of accidental divergences, the powerful 
effects of infinitessimal changes long continued ; above all, the 
beautiful law of analogy, the law which shows that there is unity 
in perpetual variety." 

In French and English there are many thousand words almost 
identical in either form or sound : 

Pronouncer, imiter, avancer, commencer, compter are plain to 
the English eye, and by pronouncing k as in old English the 
French canif becomes knife. 

So bread, butter and cheese, in the German Brod, Butter and 
Kase show the relationship of English and German, and thou- 
sands of other words are more or less the same. 

In all the inflected languages the endings of nouns vary so 
greatly as to have made it necessary for the grammarian to dis- 
tribute nouns into various classes called declensions, each being 
made up of nouns that use the same inflection. The same system 
of endings was applied to pronouns, adjectives and verbs, and 
in the verbs the various orders of inflections were classified by 
the grammarian as conjugations. 

The original roots found by philologists are of the simplest 
structure, and no doubt must have passed through the stage of 
agglutination before they began to develop the more fruitful 
forms of inflection, these being the result of attrition and pho- 
netic change and decay through the principle of unconscious econ- 
omy of effort in utterance. Aryans developed both forms of in- 
flection, that by terminations as well as by vowel change. Semitic 
races, when they passed beyond this agglutinative stage, clung to 
the internal method of inflection and based the whole structure of 
their language on so doing. 

Being slow in developing civilization, the Aryans escaped the 
crystallization that earlier civilization entails. 

But some credit is due to the innate genius of a race for this 
result. The Aryans were destined to be worthy of their high 
position as the ultimate masters of other races and of the forces 
of nature. 44 

Children and rustics may drawl and prolong one syllable into 
two, and some children have to be broken of the habit of drawling 

44 Hutson, The Study of Languages, p. 50. 



LANGUAGE. 271 

wa-all, boa-ard, fa-an, etc. Sta-at, bo-ot, etc., are adult instances. 
The Mountaineer Crackers drawl thus and maybe the Yankee 
whine is from similar peculiarities of speech. 

Even in the origination of any existing language there must 
have been contact of tribes and races and a separation among 
tribal units gave way to some force impelling unity. 

Exogamy impelled mating with wives of another tribe, and 
hence the evils of inbreeding and rival contentions for sweethearts 
in the same tribe were escaped. Often tribes were practically 
families, so marrying out of the tribe was as natural as marrying 
out of one's family. Hence dialects arose with masculine and 
feminine forms of speech. The Burmese has this distinction. 
Disagreements between sex and gender are explained by this. 

Language is a growth and cannot be artificially constructed 
into an universal tongue. The tendency of all language is from 
simple roots to synthesis and by disintegration and substitution 
from synthesis to analysis. By phonetic decay the tendency is to 
analytic structure. 

Semitic and Aryan roots are wholly diverse. Agglutinative 
tongues are very diverse in structure and origin. Monosyllabic 
dialects cannot be classified as having identical origin. 

Civilization brings development of a language to a standstill. 
Some race's reached this plane during their monosyllabic stage, 
others at the agglutinative, and others in the inflected stage. 
These are the yellow races, the Chinese having reached civiliza- 
tion before their language had grown out of the monosyllabic 
stage. The Tartars had attained agglutinative and the Osmanli 
Turks had climbed to a sort of inflection. 

The white races were capable of indefinitely continuing and 
perfecting a civilization carried up the highest forms of inflec- 
tion in the time of their long youth, while they remained aloof 
from the centre of civilization. 

English is cursed with atrocious spelling, but not forever. It 
comes from its complex origin. 

Alan existed in America in the closing of the quaternary pe- 
riod, chipped arrow heads have been found beneath elephant bones 
in the Missouri Valley. 



?72 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

A long compound idea being bundled up in one utterance is 
holphrastic and a reduplication of the same syllable expresses the 
plural. 

The holophrastic languages all belong to the American conti- 
nent and to one race, though that consists of many tribes. 

Hutson 4 '"' compares Akkad, Finnish and Magyar as similar 
Turanian tongues, and speaks of both Akkadi and Sumeri as Tu- 
ranian near the mouth of the Euphrates 4000 years B. C. That 
the Akkads used papyryi or parchment and hieroglyphs as script. 
When the Akkads came down into the plains they exchanged the 
smoother writing material for clay and used cuneiform char- 
acters. 

They extended from the Mountains of Elam to the Island 
of Cyprus, and may have formed the basis of Egyptian civiliza- 
tion, possibly the Etruscans. Eridu was a great commercial city. 
Akkad and Sumeri were agglutinative tongues. The Yakut, a 
Turkish tongue on Siberian seas, has no verb. Sit means one 
concerned in whatever the root signifies, like "enger" in French, 
boulenger, etc. ; ati means wares, ati-sit thus means a merchant, 
ayi-sit a creator. 

Powell 46 summarizes thus : 

Combination. Two or more words may be united to form a 
new one, and four methods or stages of combination may be 
noted. 

(a) By juxtaposition, two words placed together, and yet 
remain distinct words. In Chinese the roots giving no clue to the 
sense of united words. 

(b) By compounding two words into one, where in which 
case the original naming of roots is not changed : house-top rain- 
bow, tell-tale. 

(c) By agglutination, where one or more of the elements 
may be changed, but the elements are fused together : truthful, 
holiday. 

(d) By inflection, greater modification of the roots by com- 

45 Hutson, Op. Cit, p. 107. 

"Bureau Eth. Rep., 1879 to 1880, Vol. I, J. W. Powell on Evolution of 
Language . 



LANGUAGE. 273 

binatiori to form new words, conjugations and declensions. 

These methods run into each other: 

Compound words when two or more unchanged words form 
one. 

Agglutinative when slight change occurs in roots. 

Inflected when greater change occurs in roots. 

In these inflections there is a theme or root and a formative 
element, the latter to qualify or define them, to indicate mode, 
tense, number, gender of verbs and other parts of speech. 

Mallery classifies language as: 

I. Isolating languages, words arranged together without 
change, form or grammatical construction. Spoken by Chinese, 
Siamese, Burmese. 

II. Inflecting languages. Each word shows by its own form 
its relation to the idea which it represents. Aryans : Sanskrit, 
Latin, Gothic. 

III. Agglutinative: Formed by suffixes to words modify- 
ing and limiting it. Finns, Turks and many North Asiatic 
tribes. 

IV. Incorporative languages : Leading word split and modi- 
fier inserted, prefixed or suffixed, so the whole sentence sounds 
as one word. Most American tribes, Basque also. Causes of 
changes in languages, war and migration. 

The simpler these conditions of life the more accurately does 
similarity of language testify kinship of blood. 

The deduction could be made from considering the history of 
language creation that the only rational method of studying a 
foreign language is that of Richard S. Rosenthal. Sentences' are 
learned rather than isolated words. The words are divided into 
necessary and unnecessary ones. Shakespeare used 12,000 words, 
Milton 11,000, Carlyle 9,000; Prendergast estimated that 600 
words sufficed the generality of mankind, and Bayard Taylor es- 
timated that 1,500 were all that were needed for practical pur- 
poses. Rosenthal thinks that 4,000 are used in common transac- 
tions. He advises using these sentences until you think in the 
foreign languages. All these sentences are practical phrases based 
upon actual occurrences of every-day life. He also thinks that 
study should be aloud in mastering a language. 



274 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

The visualization process of teaching children to recognize 
words before learning their letters is also in accordance with 
nature, as man has acquired his familiarity with written symbols 
first as mere pictures and representations of pictures, and cer- 
tainly so far as English is concerned the discordant spelling makes 
the word a mere symbol composed of letters often having little 
connection with the pronunciation. We are frequently forced to 
write a word and examine it "to see how it looks" before being 
able to say if the spelling is correct or not. 

If Shakespeare could stand on our stage today he would ap- 
pear to talk to us in an unknown tongue, though his writing is 
as intelligible to us as then, says John Peile. 

"Literature was assailed in its downfall by enemies from 
within as well as from without. A prepossession against secular 
learning had taken hold of those ecclesiasts who gave the tone 
to the rest. It was inculcated in the most extravagant degree by 
Gregory I, the founder in a great measure of the papal supre- 
macy and the chief authority in the dark ages. It is even found 
in Alcuin, to whom so much is due ; and it gave way very grad- 
ually in the revival of literature. In some of the monastic 
foundations, especially in that of Isidore, though himself a man 
of considerable learning, the perusal of the heathen authors was 
prohibited." 47 . The tenacity of the clergy for the Latin liturgy 
and sacred writings preserved grammatical learning while it did 
not suppress superstition. 

Prof. Cross, of Yale, 48 points out instances of reversion and 
survival of the oscillations between romance and realism. The 
novel growing by selection, rejection, addition and modification. 

So words and their uses develop, decay and resolve into new 
combinations subject to the law of survival of the fittest. Lan- 
guage changes while literature tries to fix it and succeeds to some 
extent and the writings of great authors help largely in this, the 
styles of authorship and what will be popular reading likewise 
undergo development, retrogradation and reappearance in dif- 
ferent forms. 



47 Hallam, Op. Cit., pt. 1, Vol. I, Ch. I. 
48 The Development of the English Novel. 



LANGUAGE. 



75 



The dawning of history is comparable to the fifth-year dawn 
of memory in the child, the awakening of consciousness that can 
be remembered. 

Analogy would indicate that the race can record the first 
boasts of its kings, the means of trickery by its priests, finally 
its commerce and history, and later a literature of science, art 
and fiction, so the human being in childhood awakes to brain 
records of events, recalls its sports and exploits and eventually 
the intellectual consciousness may, but does not always, grow 
more acute and active. The brain may be said to begin perman- 
ent special records at the memory age where impressions were 
merely general before. 

The step by step progress of inventions, discoveries and of in- 
telligence can be realized in the building up of the printers' art 
from block letters to its present enormous state of development. 

The invention of paper to replace parchment and the desire 
to be able to avoid employing a secretary for private correspond- 
ence led to more extensive literary polish. The earliest linen 
paper letter is mentioned by Mabillon as one from Joinville to 
St. Louis, older than 1770. Cotton paper later became more 
general 

We test the correctness of our spelling by scrutinizing the 
written word to "see whether it looks right," so it is a hieroglyph 
after all and any other sort of symbol would answer as well if 
committed to memory. Our letters seem to afford us a more 
convenient means of creating symbols that stand for words, but 
they are mere approximations when we consider the vast differ- 
ence between the spelling and pronunciation acquired by some 
words. 

We learn everything as symbols, we read the expressions on 
the faces of others as heiroglyphics standing for certain moods, 
and are often mistaken, just as we are in words made of letters. 

We cannot and do not try to analyze what we see or hear into . 
components when we observe or listen ordinarily, life is too short 2 
for any such attempt. We grasp the whole idea, more or less cor- 
rectly in the single view or sound, just as the Chinaman reads 
his marks and the phonograph diaphragm gathers together the 
complex vibrations of the line into a familiar sound which our 



276 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

auditory nerve then translates into other vibrations, and the brain 
center recognizes these vibrations as standing for a certain idea 
or memory. 

Miiller cites the vocabulary of the Tagan Fuegians of 30,000 
words against the small number of words and ideas in the ordi- 
nary vocabulary of the English peasant as evidence against the 
Fuegians having savage ancestry. The savage may have an ab- 
surd number of useless words to express an idea which the peas- 
ant can make known by one word. 

In the Sanskrit and Persian there are words scarcely needing 
translation into English ; they are pader, mader, sunu, dokhter, 
brader, manp, eyeumen, the eye, brouwa, the eyebrow, nasa, the 
nose, hrti, the heart, stara a star, arrivi a river, ghau, a cow, 
sarpam, a serpent. In Persian we have the explanation of behter 
or the comparative better having originated from the positive 
beh or good, which latter word we lost while retaining the other. 

Miiller mentions the Oxford dictionary as containing 250,000 
words, which, with ten changes by declination, conjugation or 
degrees of comparison, you have in English alone two and a half 
million words, but a poet is very eloquent who uses 10,000 words ; 
he then digresses to note the 30,000 or more used by some sav- 
ages, of which we may say the multitude are useless, and in the 
fifth century Sanskrit was analyzed into 2,000 roots, but by 
MiillerV closer scrutiny he cuts these down to 800, and these 
sounds became the signs not only of emotions, but of concepts, 
for all roots are expressive of concepts, as that milk, snow and 
chalk are white. He says that in some cases a concept is a mere 
shadow of a number of percepts, as when we speak of oaks, 
beeches and firs as trees, but suppose we had no such names as 
black, white and tree, where would the concept be? If we ex- 
amine these 800 roots carefully we find they do not represent an 
equal number of concepts. There are, for instance, about seven- 
teen roots, all meaning to plait, to weave, to sew, to bind, to 
unite ; about thirty roots, all meaning to crush, to pound, to de- 
stroy, to waste, to rub, to smooth; about seventeen meaning to 
cut, to divide, and so on. He believes the original meaning of 
roots was always special, but became generalized by usage, 
though certain generalized became specialized also. So he re- 



LANGUAGE. 277 

duces the 800 roots to 121 concepts, which arc the rivers that feed 
the whole ocean of thought and speech. 



CHAPTER IX. 
HUNGER AND LOVE. 

The amount and kind of food attainable not only affects the 
size of the animal but also determines and modifies vital func- 
tions. A hydroid medusa can be induced by lack of nourishment 
to assume the polyp form, that is revert to or degenerate into 
the larval form of the species, 1 Hunter changed the stomach of a 
gull into a gizzard by a change of food. 2 Some woodpeckers 
accidentally found sap of a nourishing nature in holes they bored 
to get at insects, and sap finally became the object instead of the 
incident of their search and the sap-sucker species was created. 
Bee-eaters are a family of picarian birds, the sexes being alike in 
color, and this liking for bees must have been acquired. While 
owls have become night prowlers by evolution, burrowing owls 
get their food in the day time. They live often in a marmot bur- 
row with snakes and feed on the young marmots. The Mexican 
tree porcupines are not known to drink water. Some animals are 
great feeders and others consume very little food. The horned 
lizard is a small feeder and is capable of long fasts and is sup- 
posed never to drink. But an insect that did not eat at all would 
seem to be impossible were it not that the May-fly lives but a few 
days and has no mouth. Its larvae feed on minute plants and are 
free swimmers. Their evolution seems to be arrested by faulty 
development. Among apparent caprices of feeding it is said that 
at Aden the natives can swim in the open sea without fear of 
sharks when a European would be instantly devoured. This 
suggests the alleged instance of wolves refusing to eat the corpses 
of the Mexican soldiers during the war of the United States with 
Mexico, while the American soldiers were always eaten, the rea- 
son being found in the saturation of the Mexicans with their 
favorite red pepper addition to all their dishes. The Russian 

1 Hincks, Allman and Schneider, Semper, p. 66. 

2 Semper, p. 68. 

278 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 279 

wolves arc loss particular for they tear to pieces and try to eat 
anything thrown to them by persons trying to escape from them 
and they instantly devour one of their own number when 
wounded. The wolf is not very particular as to his feed; mice, 
i: gs, buds of trees or lichens go to supply his ravenous capacity. 
Liens are not very choice in their eating as they will feast upon 
flesh in advanced stages of decomposition. The aard wolf, a 
degenerate hyena, lives on carrion and termites. The cheek 
pouches of monkeys are developed through necessity of holding 
large quantities of food till ready for digestion later, enabling 
hurried gathering and subsequent leisurely eating. The Kaola 
is a cheek-pouched animal. Most animals in Kamschatka live 
on fish and so the environment determines the kind of animals 
that will survive there, such animals as could not adjust to a fish 
diet had to leave the country or perish. The fishing cat habitat is 
from southern India to China, but its diet is not exclusive for 
this fierce animal destroys and eats sheep or infants, snakes or 
molluscs. The baboon is an impartial gourmand and eats any- 
thing from insects to fruit. Our remote several-times-removed 
uncles the lemurs are more omnivorous than we are. They are 
essentially night prowlers and live in forests, on leaves, fruits, 
insects, reptiles, birds' eggs and the birds themselves. The black 
bear is growing more carnivorous and appears to be dissatisfied 
with a diet of herbs and destroys more than he eats. Bears are 
generally fond of honey and risk bee stings bravely in getting 
at it. When meat fails the grizzly feeds on berries, acorns, nuts, 
etc. In Europe the brown bear kills and eats cattle but in the 
Himalayas insects and vegetables are its food, unless it happens 
upon a carcass. In Kamschatka it subsists upon salmon. The 
polar bear eats sea weed, grasses, lichens as well as flesh. Crab 
eating macaques have a wide distribution. The sloth has remark- 
able ability to survive injury and poison eating. It may also fast 
for a month without trouble. It is like the reptiles in being lowly 
organized in such respects. It expends little energy and hence is 
less sensitive and needs less fuel for its mechanism to work upon. 
Equivalent to human addictions such as tobacco, liquor, and hash- 
eesh all members of the cat family have a great relish for catnip, 
whether lions, tigers, leopards or pumas. The domestic cat is 



280 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

attracted by valerian and enjoys its odor immensely. Most vam- 
pires are not blood-suckers, but two species are now known to be 
such. Darwin caught one in the act of sucking blood from a 
horse. Blood-sucking mosquitoes are well known. Robber flies 
suck other insects dry. Pressed by hunger locusts eat plants they 
ordinarily avoid and devour their own dead or even go so far as 
to eat their own larvae. Snakes feed upon lesser snakes, in obe- 
dience to the widely applicable law of eating animals that can 
not eat you. The climbing snakes of Europe feed on voles and 
mice, and incidentally they thus benefit farmers. Pythons crush 
their victims, cover them with saliva and, when gorging them- 
selves, are easily killed. Lizards are either herbivorous or insect- 
iverous. Armadilloes crush snakes and eat them. Sea anemones 
are carnivorous. The microscopical rotifer whips its cilia around 
to draw food to its mouth. The majority of eagles kill their own 
prey, but few refuse to eat what is found dead, and some eat 
carrion. The golden eagle hunts rabbits in pairs, one is reserved 
to watch for a departure from the course and pounces on the 
rabbit when he escapes, the other eagle follows him closely. Mr. 
Hume, a naturalist, says that in India the imperial eagle is a foul 
feeder and a coward, even crows have whipped him. Birds of 
paradise are omnivorous. The shoveller duck of India is equally 
at home in foul or fair pools and feeds on everything whether 
nice or nasty. A family of perching birds feed on honey from 
flowers of the gum and other trees in Australia, by means of a 
long extensile tongue. The rhinoceros hornbill catches food on 
the end of its bill and tosses it in the air and catches it in its 
mouth. The New Zealand Ka-Ka parrot kills sheep for food and 
eats their kidneys. The raven is a scavenger but attacks weak 
lambs or feeble fawns. Crows live upon carcasses and droppings, 
especially the carrion crow. The rook eats insects but plunders 
cornfields. Petrels are the "sea-vultures," when an animal is 
killed numbers of petrels appear as by magic and gorge themselves 
till they cannot fly and they fight for the first bite, disgorging an 
evil smelling oily fluid if disturbed. A cormorant gorges a live 
eel but a stork shakes it to death first. Martens are blood thirsty 
and kill more than they devour. The nut cracker examines and 
cracks nuts to eat. Brids' eggs and young of other birds are ab- 



HUNGER AND LOVK. 28] 

sorbed by the destructive jaw Piping crows of Australia eat 
great quantities of grass-hoppers. The spoon-beaked sturgeon 
probably feels for its prey, as its eyes are small. The parrot-fish 
with horny beaks are able to browse on the coral polyps without 
being stung by their stinging cells. File-fishes feed on corals and 
molluscs, by means of strong incisors. Fishes may be vegetarian 
or. carniverous, but the mud-fish of Africa devour everything 
given them that they can swallow, and then kill and eat each 
other. They have peculiar limbs on each side and come to the 
surface to breathe. 

Oxygen, whether uerived from the air or the water, is a food, 
and a very necessary one. In low forms of life oxygen is ab- 
sorbed by the same channels that take in and assimilate all other 
food. Even in some early fish forms, without lungs or gills, such 
as the Cobitus fossilis, the air was separated from the water in 
the intestines. The swimming bladder is a rudimentary lung, 
and by becoming more and more vascular the air in contact with 
the blood vessels of that bladder yields oxygen, and the gill and 
lung methods of breathing become rivals for affording oxygena- 
tion of the blood. In the lung-fishes the air bladder is elongated 
and performs the function of a lung ; the mudfish comes to the 
surface to breathe as do water mammals, these and air breathers 
take in and let out air at the surface of the water, and drown if 
kept under, while others habituated to water breathing will 
perish in the air, though some can live in either air or water. The 
mudfish dies out of the air. The siren salamander has external 
gills but can also breathe wholly by lungs, this form has no hind- 
limbs and looks like a snake. It is torpid from October to April. 
The hell-bender, or Mississippi salamander, has been seen to 
blow air from its lungs over its gills to oxygenate the latter. If 
the mouth of a frog is kept open it cannot breathe, and dies of 
suffocation, comparable to the dependence of a horse upon its 
nostrils through which it breathes ; paralysis of a horse's nostrils 
means suffocation. Serpent heads, torpid in hard mud in the dry 
season, are amphibious, and live either on the ground in the air, 
or get their oxygen direct from the water. When embryo fish 
have gills which they shed upon developing into lung animals the 
pseudo-branchial remains of the gills, become a mere plexus of 



282 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

blood vessels. I advanced the idea that the thyroid gland, ton- 
sils and thymus gland were probably remains of the external and 
internal gills of the fish embryonal stage of man, when the fish 
cardinal vascular system occurs, and the pleura covers these 
glands in development. Occasionally gill slits may persist in 
man in the unsightly branchial fistulas, or slits in the neck. The 
embryo of man has well defined gill slits with other animals. 3 

As the roots of plants grow towards their food so the amoeba 
and other protozoa are attracted to their sustenance. If what is 
eaten is chemically converted by the intestinal cells certainly 
chemical attraction exists in those regions, and undeniable chem- 
ical processes take place in the building up of blood, bone, car- 
tilage, muscle, nerve, brain and other tissues; then ultimately 
hunger is chemical attraction and we merely recognize it in con- 
sciousness. The seed of the plant gets its chemical nourishment 
from the soil, air and water, and these are to the plant what 
organic compounds, as meat and vegetables, with inorganic air 
and water, are to the animal, and the chemical absorption from 
the circulation and tissues of what is needed to build the embryo 
is similarly supplied to the seed by the soil in its development 
into a plant. Cuvier likens the intestines of animals to a reser- 
voir from which nutriment is drawn for the system, as animals 
move about and plants remain stationary and do not need such 
a reservoir. Huxley holds to the identity of animals with plants. 4 
The entire muscular, nervous and other apparatus of life that 
enables movement is evolved because it enables the animal to 
obtain things to put in its stomach and looking over the teeming 
populations, especially Asiatic, African and Polynesian, most 
human beings merely vegetate, exist with little if any motive or 
aim in life. The Hindoo and lizard bask in the sun and doze. 
When hunger is appeased inactivity, both bodily and mental, 
again follows. Most animals and men appear not only to eat to 
live but to live to eat. And several million people die off yearly 
through famine. Small vicissitudes of nature, such as the failure 
of rains, through forests being cut off from mountains, a bubonic 
plague, the diversion of the Yellow river of China a thousand 

5 Comparative Physiology and Psychology, 1883. 
4 Popular Science Monthly, Vol. VIII, p. 656. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 283 

fniles or so in its cutting a new channel and drowning or starving 
out multitudes, may reduce populations rapidly. India under- 
went famines in 1896, '97, '99, 1900, Russia in 1899 and China 
in 1901, among recent instances, while unnumbered pestilences 
and famines had previously afflicted these countries. 

Men and animals eat what they can get, and custom, supersti- 
tion and habit affect their ideas of what is and what is not to be 
eaten. Chinese cooking does not often agree with the white 
man's stomach ; we are repelled from rats, snakes, lizards and 
carrion, as articles of diet. Horses, frog legs and snails have 
been gradually popularized as food since the Franco-Prussian 
and South African wars. Gradual toleration is acquired for such 
things as liquors, cocoa, limburger cheese, coffee, tea, hasheesh 
and opium. The craving for some of these, such as alcoholics 
and opium, is an acquired hunger to which the intestinal cells, 
including those of the stomach particularly, have become habitu- 
ated and adjusted, until great suffering occurs from the privation 
of such poisons. In Xorth Carolina there are people who delight 
in eating clay in which there appears to be a small amount of fos- 
sil plant and animal substances. The perversion of a basic func- 
tion, such as eating, is paralleled by sexual perversion. 

Swift remarks that "the stoical scheme of supplying our 
wants by lopping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when- 
ever we want shoes." Like any other comparison too much can 
be made of it. It is not well to let our feet carry us where they 
will. We have brains as well as feet to regulate their going and 
coming, but it is not given to every one to master himself. Per- 
nicious desires, such as for liquors, should be avoided and sup- 
pressed if possible, but when fastened should be considered as due 
to disease, and the sufferer should be aided in recovery instead 
of punished, as society is inclined to do. 

Some of the mechanical relations of the feeling of hunger 
are observed in the fact that by "sinching," or making the belt 
around the waist tighter, hunger may be temporarily appeased; 
it appears to induce a feeling similar to that of fullness or reple- 
tion. Then the dependence of the bodily and mental functions 
upon plenty of water circulating all over the system is seen in 
the fact that most of our weight is in water that fills the tissues, 



284 THE EVOLUTIOxV OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

and further when crossing a hot desert there is at first great de- 
pression and languor, and if the water that is rapidly evaporated 
from the body is not promptly resupplied frenzy follows with 
chatter about drinking, and imagining that water and beer is be- 
ing drunk. This suggests that in other forms of insanity there 
may be hygroscopic faults in the brain and its ventricles and other 
channels for liquids. 

The lowest animal may be conceived of as compelled to spend 
its entire time in securing a bare subsistence, and when starva- 
tion assails a human being he is practically reduced to a similar 
necessity. His mechanism for obtaining food may be more com- 
plex, but when out of his environment this superadded structure 
merely adds to his agony, and so the highest and lowest animals 
may be placed upon the same plane in the struggle for existence. 

The processes of digestion normally take place without mak- 
ing us aware of them ; disease may change this so that we become 
conscious that something is going om in our stomach or other 
viscera. Undoubtedly there are centers in the brain connected 
with the abdominal organs, though as yet their demonstration is 
imperfect. There are some instances of complete loss of appetite 
after a head injury, and this could be from suppression of the 
visceral center function in the brain. 

The food desire is connected with special sense centres in the 
brain. The call to meals causes the worst dements in an asylum 
to scramble to their feet and rush to the table, showing that 
auditory associations are all-powerful as reminders of the eating 
functions. Snails can be trained to know the voice that calls them 
to eat and respond to it promptly. Sights and odors are most 
closely associated with the eating faculty and desires. My hippo- 
campal theory is worth mentioning at this point. 5 The hippo- 
campus major can be safely assumed as directly connecting the 
olfactory or smelling sense with the centres for moving the eating 
organs, such as the lips, tongue, jaws. Early mammals or rep- 
tiles dependent upon the smelling sense for food discrimination 
would certainly in time have massive strands of nerve fibres con- 
necting the smelling sense nerve roots with the brain portions 
devoted to mastication and deglutition, chewing and swallowing, 

5 Comparative Physiology and Psychology, 1883. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 285 

for smell was the main guide to every step of its eating processes. 
The large bundle of fibres that proceeds from the olactory nerve 
root, and curves around the side of the ventricles in a sickle 
shape, could readily have served this purpose. But in animals 
that have learned to depend, to a greater or less extent, upon 
vision, as to whether the food should be eaten and how it is to be 
eaten, the smelling sense is of less importance, and in the simian 
family the higher we approach to man we find the smelling sense 
growing feebler and the optic sense stronger. The hippocampus 
minor or calcar avis is found in these latter animals, and is the 
largest in man, which can be interpreted as associating the optic 
faculty with the hippocampal fibres that pass forward to the gus- 
tatorv centres that were once controlled by the olfactory fibres. 
The hippocampus major is still large and the hippocampus minor 
is small, but this is accounted for by the former having been built 
up through millions of years of prehuman existence, while the 
hippocampus minor is representative of the period when in the 
evolution of man he and his progenitors have relied upon eye- 
sight more than smelling when they sought food or ate it. 

The earliest desire being for food the organs concerned in its 
reception and elaboration would be where desire for food makes 
itself manifest ; the stomach and intestinal conditions acquaint us 
with hunger and thirst or repletion, and the nerves running to the 
brain from these parts merely notify consciousness of these states. 
Hunger is not in the brain, it is in the abdomen, but the con- 
sciousness of hunger is in the brain, and the higher reflex centers 
are situated there as an evolution of the better and still better 
hunger appeasing processes, those motions best adapted to get- 
ting food in all the multitudinous ways animals and men have 
developed. 

Clouston of Edinburgh suggested that alcohol was often 
craved when it was a misinterpretation of some other physio- 
logical desire that was really concerned. The passage of a urin- 
ary calculus can cause great pain and a* distended colon or bladder 
mav arouse a general congested feeling with attempts at relief 
of other than the real organ involved. This sort of misconstruc- 
tion reminds one of the lines in Tom Hood's Rae Wilson, in 



286 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

which he mentions the self-elected saint feeling pious when he 
was only bilious. 

Hunger is the earliest desire and is inherited and constructed 
from the attractions of atoms for atoms and molecules which 
go to make up the living cells. All acquisitive desires and facul- 
ties are derived from and based upon hunger. As money is 
merely representative wealth, and no wealth is desirable in the 
absence of food, a tentative location of acquisitiveness may be 
placed at the gustatory centers and the pneumogastric roots in 
the brain. 

The dislike for food (anorexia) that occurs in melancholia is 
due to the want of tone of the intestinal tract with the poisons 
that are generated and retained in the stomach, fresh food lying 
undigested and adding to the distress and the weakened brain 
misinterprets bad sensations as due to persecution. The entire 
body loathes food in this instance just as the entire body par- 
ticipates in an orgasm and for comparable reasons. The hunger 
of pregnancy is owing to the added necessity for food to build 
up the new organism superimposed upon the mother, and some- 
times the system cannot properly interpret the demands made 
upon it and in some pregnant women there are perversions of 
appetite in consequence. 

An Indian can go days without eating, and starving sensa- 
tionalists use a minimum of food taken secretly while pretending 
to take none at all, a common trick of hysterical notoriety-seek- 
ers. It is a fact that one can become blunted to hunger and not 
suffer as much as at first and in the last stages of starvation all 
desire for food disappears. Repression of the sexual function 
would be more possible in the aged and less possible in the young, 
particularly when living on good food. Rich food and wines 
would render suppression in a young adult next to impossible. 

Hunger concerns the enteric and every other cell in the body 
that is nourished and varies according to cellular needs. The 
assimilative attraction of organic and inorganic substances to 
cells as food necessarily involved a growth, and incidentally 
excretion of such materials as could not be taken into the cellular 
organism. So eating, growth and excretion were the first facul- 
ties evolved from chemical affinities in living organisms, and 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 2S7 

when a growing- cell splits into two or more cells, then repro- 
duction appeared. Contractility is merely assimilative motion, 
the primitive object of all animal motion being assimilative. Irri- 
tability and automatism are motilities derived from the assimila- 
tive. The secretory is merely another term for excretory meta- 
bolism following assimilation. Materials excreted by one cell or 
set of cells, such as an organ, may be adapted as food for an- 
other set of cells, or some of the excreted compounds may be 
selected by the cells until finally completed excreted. The respir- 
atory process is an assimilative one. The muscles and nervous 
system are built primarily upon the ingestive tube, and the vas- 
cular and lymphatic systems are also appendages of the intes- 
tines, so we have the enteric tract first developed. Nutrient chan- 
nels are the intestines, lymphatics, arteries and veins. These 
supply the other cells of the body with food, and reciprocally the 
limbs and jaws contribute to the procuring of food. Hence in 
the evolution of the body the intestines stand first; next is the 
blood vessel system, then the locomotor apparatus. The sense 
organs arise from the tactile. The limbs develop the jaw, demon- 
strably in lobsters and crabs, and are built upon the enteric 
development. Innervation of the eating canal precedes all other 
innervation, necessarily, for it is the earliest and most important 
means of correlating the lowest life functions. As the eating, 
growing, excreting and reproductive faculties are the earliest and 
most general they are very tenacious and the last processes to 
become extinct. The breathing ability is a form of eating, for 
oxygen is a food, and a little spot called the vacuole that appears 
in any part of the amoeba, a spot that enlarges and bursts, is the 
early forerunner of respiration through a fixed organ such as 
gills or lungs. This vacuole contains the gases generated by 
assimilation, to be excreted, as carbonic acid, etc., the oxygen 
being absorbed by all parts of the animal, therefore the vacuole 
is expiratory and performs only the exhaling function and so is 
the representative of the lung in the excretory sense only. The 
lowest animal moves, eats, excretes and reproduces. Differen- 
tiation of organs enables these movements and functions to be 
more definite, but even to the highest animal these are the main 
accomplishments of existence. The correlation of these functions 



2SS THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

is obtained through a highly organized relating nervous system, 
rendering the movements more intelligent in man and other 
higher animals. ■ 

Xo sooner are young turtles hatched than myriads of them 
fall victims to land crabs and sea birds, while when they reach 
the sea fishes destroy them. During the breeding season the 
males fight and the disabled ones are seized by sharks. The 
association of hunger with love, primarily, will appear later in 
this chapter. 

The anolis lizard males are extremely jealous and fight till 
one loses his tail which is the sign of defeat and this probably 
reduces his value in the eyes of the female. Woodcocks skulk 
until love makes them bold when they fight for mates. Male chaf- 
finches are furiously jealous of rivals. Cock birds fight in spring 
to June. The ruff (Totanus pugnax), another of the plover 
tribe, is remarkable for the males forming ruffs around their 
necks periodically, and these ruffs seldom are twice alike, being 
also variable at the same season. Very pugnacious are the cocks 
and they differ from all their kin in being polygamous, the fe- 
males largely exceeding the males in number. The males fight 
French duels for possession of the females. The mute swan 
nests in May when the male is extremely belligerent. Mr. Jen- 
ner Weir finds that all male birds with rich or strongly charac- 
terized plumage are more quarrelsome than the dull colored spe- 
cies belonging to the same groups. The gold finch for instance 
is far more pugnacious than the linnet and the blackbird than the 
thrush, and seasonal changes cause pugnacity when gaily orna- 
mented. Brilliantly colored parrots have bad tempers. The sal- 
mon males fight fiercely with one another in attending the females 
when spawning. When a stickleback fish is conquered in sex 
fight his gallant bearing is over, his gay colors fade and he hides 
his disgrace, but is for some time the constant object of his con- 
queror's persecution. Male salmon and trout are great fight- 
ers, two male salmon have been seen to fight all day, the males 
are constantly fighting and tearing each other in the spawning 
beds and injure each other so as to cause many deaths, exhaus- 
tion and dying states. In the breeding season the lower jaw 
of the male changes to a hook-like projection for fighting. Sea 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 2S9 

lions have pitched battles for mates. Eared seals are polygamous 
and the males arc the larger. Old males wait at the "rookeries" 
and wage war for the females, the strongest get the largest num- 
i females, usually ten to fifteen, and they fast to guard their 
harems several weeks. An old sea bear in a similar fight to 
build up his harem, favored by a single path of access and a 
sort of fortified situation, had forty-five of the gentle females. 
Darwin's law of battle 0, or fighting for females is nearly uni- 
versal. Even the kangaroo males, otherwise harmless, engage 
in fierce contests during the pairing season. 

Women are constantly the cause of war in the same tribe or 
between different tribes. The Indians of North America have a 
regular system of battle, men wrestle for women and the strong- 
est gets her, so the youths constantly practice wrestling. 7 Hot 
blooded southern races are apt to imitate animals in their fights 
or battles for love, but in jealousy among Northern people there 
is apt to be less bloody results. 

The season of love among birds and other animals is that of 
battle. It does not appear that females prefer the victor. Ko- 
Walevsky says the female capercailzie will sometimes steal away 
with a young male who has not dared to enter the arena with 
the older cocks. If the law of battle or any other performance 
becomes the settled method among a species by which mating 
should occur then departures from that rule would practically 
amount to bird or other animal immorality, it is sexual prefer- 
ence acted upon in defiance of conventional rules, intriguing and 
violation of social laws. It is probable that sparrows condemn 
Lotharios to death by a court resembling the old Saxon hundred 
court, and then appoint an executioner who may be an aggrieved 
party. The red deer of Scotland are distracted by wandering 
males trying to disturb the peace of mated pairs. The battles 
of knights errant were often for lady loves. Darwin notes that 
the victors in animal battles are not always attractive, for other 
matters than prowess are factors, such as song and colors. Sham 
battles are sometimes engaged in like the contests of oratory, 
foot ball, etc., of human competitors. Voices appear to have the 

Descent of Man, Vol. I, p. 228. 

7 Descent of Man. Chas. Darwin. Vol. I, pp. 308, et seq. 



290 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

double primary function of frightening rivals or enemies and for 
making love. The rivalry is competitive, the ambition is to 
achieve excellence, the love of approbation is seen in matching 
birds to sing when one may drop dead from rupturing a blood 
vessel in the lungs in trying to sing loudest and longest. 8 Vocal 
and instrumental sounds so commonly serve as a love call or love 
charm that the power producing them Darwin thinks was prob- 
ably first developed in connection with propagation of the species. 
He notes that the male stickleback (Gasterosteus leisurus) is mad 
with delight when the female comes out and surveys the nest he 
has made for her. He darts around her in every direction and 
tries to push her with his snout and pull her by the tail and side 
spines to the nest. Love handicaps birds with heavy plumage 
and makes them conspicuous to their enemies, a consciousness 
of which develops shyness. The presence of a female true 
cuckoo excites the interest of more than one male. She utters a 
kwik, wik, wik, and attracts all the males who quarrel and fight. 
During the love season the double call cue, cue, koo, is heard as 
if the male were trembling with passion. They are polyandrous 
and the females do the courting. 

The robber flies (Asilidae) feed upon other insects by sucking 
them dry and the males take advantage of the female being en- 
gaged in a repast to approach the female, otherwise he might be 
emptied of his liquid contents. This may be but an impartial 
appetite such as enables animals to eat their young but there are 
other cannabalistic acts associated directly with sexual ardor to 
which I called attention in 1881. 9 

Dog females bestow their affections and are not always pru- 
dent in their loves and are apt to fling themselves away on curs 
of low degree. If reared with the vulgar an affection may spring 
up which nothing can subdue. 10 The Chinese Sunday schools 
with white women teachers and the negro or other coachman too 
often in company of the heiress occasionally exhibit the power 
of propinquity. Darwin holds that female dogs are attracted by 

s Op. Cit, Vol. II, pp. 47 to 50. 

9 Comparative Physiology and Psychology, 1883. 

10 Mayhew, quoted by Darwin, Op. Cit., p. 258. 



HUNGER AM) LOVE. 291 

large sized males 11 but it is rare for a male to refuse any female 
dog. Dogs form decided preferences for each other being often 
influenced by size, bright color and individual character, as well 
as by the degree of their previous familiarity. Stallions are capri- 
cious, rejecting one mare and taking to another without appar- 
ent cause. Some mares have been known to reject a horse. Sows 
reject one boar and prefer others, cows also refuse certain bulls, 
as, for instance, a Jersey may not like a Holstein. Darwin notes 
that most female fish are larger than the male and the males 
suffer from their small size for they are liable to be devoured 
by the females of their own species. The larger size of the 
female doubtless enables production of large quantities of ova. 
In many cases the male alone has bright colors and has orna- 
mented appendages, and when they are young males resemble 
adult females. In a siluroid fish of South America, the Plecos- 
tomas barbatus, the male has a beard of stiff hair, which is absent 
in the female. With fishes there is a close relation between their 
colors and sexual functions, and organs and colors may develop 
during the breeding season ; the males are ardent in courtship 
and often fight desperately with each other. The higher orna- 
mented males appear to urge their selection by the females. 12 

Breeders incline to think that the male of quadrupeds accepts 
any female, but it is doubtful if the female accepts any male, 
on the contrary, she often rejects the male. The capture of wives 
by the eared seals is narrated 13 as gentle at first and later fierce 
in manner. The male seal recognizes the value of, what is not 
exclusively human, obsequiousness and winning ways, until there 
is no further occasion for them, when the brute nature of seals 
and man may then assert itself in gruffness and severity. Night 
jar females exert the choice and when it is made other males are 
driven off. Among pheasants there is caprice in all attachments. 
The pea hen is most excited by the male that pleases her by bril- 
liance, melody or gallantry. 14 The general effect is what deter- 
mines the choice as with human beings. Magpies console them- 

11 Op. Cit, p. 258. 

'"Op. Cit., p. 7. ' y 

13 Op. Cit., p. 257. 

14 Op. Cit., pp. in, 118. 



2Q2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

selves rapidly with new mates when the old ones die. Owls also, 
according to White of Selborne, and sparrows, chaffinches, night- 
ingales and redstarts. The sitting widow soon gives effectual 
notice that she is forlorn. An instance is given 15 of a starling 
consoling itself with a new mate three times in one day when 
the others were shot. Birds in the same cage do not always mate, 
so mere nearness is only one among several factors in mating, 
and birds of the same sex may sometimes live together occasion- 
ally, even in triplets, as with starlings, carrion crows, parrots 
and quails. With the latter there have been combinations of two 
females and one male, and, one female and two males. 10 Some 
macaws with harsh voices have bad taste in sound and color at- 
traction, as through association had reconciled them to defects, 
modifying the aesthetic by the sexual ardor. The grouse in- 
dulges in courtship antics, and makes a drumming noise with its 
feathers. Darwin observes that the diversity of sounds used as 
means of courtship is remarkable. He describes the antics of 
the remarkable bower birds of Australia who collect museums of 
shells, bones, feathers and leaves to display as wealth to attract 
mates. So the idea of property possession is united with vanity 
in courtship, the display of plumage of birds and other evidences 
ol great vanity is mentioned. A naval officer who had been ship- 
wrecked in the Pacific Ocean on a small island frequented by 
penguins says that the salacity of those birds is surprising. The 
common eel is notorious for intertwining apposition in direct 
conjugation, a rather surprising inclination, when we consider the 
spawning without contact of fish in general, even though many 
fish indulge in the chase while some, as the trout, are quite gentle- 
manly, considerate and modest, following the female at a respect- 
ful distance. The bream female is followed by three or four 
admirers when she is ready to spawn. 

J. M. Aldrich, a naturalist, 17 describes courtship among the 
flies, the reluctance of females and ardor and persistence of the 
male with display of his attractions. Newts are like fishes in 
breeding without direct union. The females seize the lumps of 

15 Op. Cit, p. 101. 
10 Op. Cit., p. io2. 
17 American Naturalist, Jan. 1894, p. 35. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 293 

Spermatozoa and convey them to their reproductive organs.'* It 
is difficult to trace inducements to this sort of propagation to any- 
thing allied to methods of higher animals, but the connection 
necessarily exists. If the females of the fish left their ova to be 
fertilized by the first male who came it would not favor sexual 
selection, but the female never willingly spawns except in the 
close presence of a male and the male never fertilizes the ova 
except in the close presence of the female. The males of cer- 
tain South American and Ceylon fishes hatch eggs within their 
mouths or gills, laid there by the females. In the pipe fish, Hip- 
pocampus, etc., there are marsupial sacks or depressions on the 
abdomen of males in which eggs are laid by the female and are 
there hatched. The males show great attachment to the young. 
The Surinam toad also has pits in its back in which its young are 
reared. The sexes look alike in some birds, as true bulbuls, in 
plumage. Birds of Paradise plumage appears to be an extrava- 
gant result of sexual selection. They have dancing parties to 
parade themselves. The birds of the genus Rupicola are bril- 
liantly colored. The genus Solenostoma is exceptional in the 
female being more brightly colored than the male and birds are 
occasionally inverted, the males have selected in such cases the 
more attractive females instead of the females selecting the males. 
Snake males are always smaller than females and have more pro- 
nounced colors. They have odoriferous glands to attract fe- 
males. While male snakes are amorous they are not known to 
fight from rivalry. Lizards have sexual throat pouches and wat- 
tles which become erected in excitement. The anolis male is 
crested. The grouse has a sexual throat pouch. The male Triton 
has bright colors during courtship. The crest of the crested seal 
is presumed to be a sexual feature, like the antlers of a deer, as 
the males only are crested. 

Darwin 19 discusses beards, especially those of monkeys, as 
being sexual appendages ; often the head of hair assumes queer 
shapes. While the popular ideas are that animals are indiscrimin- 
ate, such is far from being the case universally. Lions pair for 
life and have two to six cubs at a birth in captivity. The Wan- 

ls Lydeker's Natural History, Vol. V, p. 29x1. 
19 Descent of Man, Vol. I, p. 270. 



294 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

deroo monkey is monogamous. The tigers consort in pairs, but 
for how long is unknown. Gray seals associate in pairs, while the 
eared seals are polygamous, and the causes of polygamy among 
seals are mentioned as due to natural causes. 20 

The long-beaked bustard differs from the common bustard in 
being polygamous and during the breeding season the males make 
attractive display before the females. 

Minnows are polyandrous and true cuckoos are the same, the 
female doing all the courting. 

In the present association of the sexes of human beings, all 
the different methods mentioned in a previous chapter may still 
be found to exist today, as well as the Thibetan strange custom 
of polyandry where one woman may have several husbands. Dr. 
Cook says that the West Australians, California Indians and the 
Santals of India pair like the beasts of the field and the birds of 
the forest, 21 and that "among the natives of Northwest Greenland 
coast the genital sense is decidedly periodical. There is a grand 
annual outbreak of ardor after the return of the sun. It comes 
with such force and takes them with such suddenness that they 
frequently quiver with passion for several days. This culminates 
during the first summer days in what may be called an epidemic 
of venery when marital exchanges are made with seeming grace 
and good intentions." 22 

An Arabian tribe marries for so many days in the week, com- 
monly for days during which the wife must be faithful, but on 
the other days she may do as she pleases. Unfaithfulness in some 
hill tribes of India in the male is a grave offense, but is regarded 
as trivial when the wife is unfaithful. The Tartar wife thinks 
she must b^ abused by the husband or she is not liked, and it is a 
query if the Formorian Turanians introduced this idea into Hiber- 
iiia. Among the Basques the father goes to bed when his infant 
is born and the wife goes to her work. Other peculiar beliefs 
and customs are described by Herbert Spencer. 23 Monogamy, 
polygamy, etc., are products of the periods and circumstances in 

20 American Naturalist, Feb. 1891, p. 103. 

21 Quoting Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 28. 

22 F. A. Cook, American Anthropologist, Vol. XI, p. 230. 

23 Study of Sociology, p. 135. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 295 

which they arise. Wars could be followed by polygamy when il 
did not previously exist, and polyandry could arise in a country 
where many female children were destroyed at birth; What might 
be regarded as the best interests of an animal, man, race, people 
at one time might be considered as detrimental later, so promis- 
cuity, polyandry and finally monogamy became best suited to the 
interests of a race. Certainly monogamous races are superior to 
others. Interbreeding is destructive of advance and has caused 
primitive arrest of development and degeneracy. Saadi of Per- 
sia in "The Gulistan" laid it down as a rule that a young woman 
cannot love an old man, but a seventy-five-year-old celebrity in 
1902 won a twenty-one-year-old bride and she brought him sev- 
eral million dollars, so money in this case was not a factor, and 
occasional instances of this kind go to show that a rule has ex- 
ceptions. Then Lady Burdett Coutts in her old age married her 
secretary, a young man, and she certainly did not marry him for 
his money, for she had an abundance herself. Too frequently un- 
happiness follows such mating. Edward III, when old, and Alice 
Perrers, the young beauty, lived very happily together. The king 
denied her nothing and she robbed him on his death bed. Love 
birds are little parrots that are greatly attached to each other, but 
there is no truth in the story of one dying of grief over the loss of 
a mate. They quarrel and bicker with each other in true marital 
style. A gander and goose were so fond of each other that sep- 
aration once nearly killed them, and their reunion was affecting; 
they crossed necks, gabbled and caressed for hours. Brehm re- 
gards the cuckoo as discontented, ill-conditioned, pessimistic and 
unamiable ; its notes are abrupt and angry. Cuckoos jealously 
guard their territorial preserves and justify the supposition that 
they are sparrow hawks in disguise. Their parasitic character is 
in keeping with their general behavior ; left on the thresholds of 
the houses of other birds they are waifs and Ishmaelites. The 
love impulse of such outcasts wane before those of hunger, and 
the starved, importunate young typify the adult. 

''Wherever the king of love cometh the arm of piety has not 
power to resist him, 24 and the complete overriding of the reason 
by the strong emotion is indicated in the observation that Cicero 

24 Saadi, Gulistan. 



296 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

after his divorce from Tullia, when invited to another marriage, 
said that he could not be wise and in love at the same time. And 
that "love is blind," further, by its wide recognition points to 
there being nothing like it to cause self-deception, delusion and 
illusions. An ugly person when loved becomes beautiful, mean 
natures are glorified. There is a hyperbole of love that puts all 
one may do in the superlative degree ; a glamour surrounds the 
loved one and the fetich spirit of worship is aroused, so that arti- 
cles that are associated with the loved one are also fondled as re- 
minders. 

The complete subjection of the intellect to the emotion of 
love renders the wisest of persons captives to the little god. It 
may be possible for a great intellect to subdue an unreasonable 
attachment, but by an extraordinary effort associated with 
anguish. He might appear indifferent or even heartless, but in 
reality be controlling passion with judgment and the suffering 
undergone may be intense. Charles Reade remarks of one who 
"set his cool brains to hatch the eggs of love and wondered that 
the result was addled." When the first ardor of passion abates 
the associated and more intelligent causes of attachment are en- 
joyed, as companionship, community of tastes, conversation, etc., 
nor is the invariable waning of the honeymoon any proof of in- 
difference, for let jealousy be aroused and there is a realization 
of the foundation of the affections. When there are so many un- 
happy marriages there could be an explanation of many of them 
as founded wholly upon impulse in defiance of reason. An inher- 
ited instinct older than reason and more deeply connected with 
every cell of the body by millions of years. The animal pranks 
of passion can thus be accounted for. A laundress in an insane 
asylum became infatuated with a lunatic, and to inform her of 
her danger I read the history record of the patient to her as that 
of a homicidal, alcoholic, irresponsible person who would not earn 
her a living and would spend what she earned recklessly. She 
insisted upon marrying the man. 

Such ferocious animals as the gorilla are cruel in their mani- 
festations of desires, and the occasional brutality of men, espe- 
cially negroes, is a reversion to the primitive animal behavior. 
The lowest intelligence may violate the helpless, even in some 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 297 

cases when swift punishment is known to surely follow. Another 
grade of intelligence falls into the divorce habit. 

Many are the instances that would parallel that of the princess 
who gave up her right to the throne succession to run away with 
a gypsy outcast lover. But an attempt to cultivate affection or 
to ignore it altogether in a manage de convenance may be de- 
feated by a repugnance to certain things which real love would 
scarcely observe. The lady who refused the King of France be- 
cause he did not wash his feet was evidently not infatuated. Races 
differ widely in their ideas of beauty, some preferring black or 
yellow skins, others the oval European face and fair skin, etc., and 
these ideals exert great influence on sexual selection. Schopen- 
hauer regards the form and not the face as inspiring love, 
but often beauty of face may be coupled with that of form, though 
the form will attract whether the face is pretty or not. Wallace 
thought that Darwin's sexual selection ideas were faulty in re- 
garding animals as choosing strength and courage, but we see in 
human beings that which with modifications is true of animals, it 
is a combination of several things going to make up a resulting 
attraction that urges the determinant, such as may enable a young 
woman to overlook age in the admiration of an intellect such as 
Chauncey Depew's. 

''Dress often suggests more than it conceals" because what 
women consider as attractive to men they incline to cultivate and 
sometimes exaggerate. The narrow waist is persisted in, some- 
times when the tight corset caused suffering and ill health, even 
though unsightly red noses, blotches and pimples follow upon 
obstructed digestion and may be known to result from the tight 
lacing, thus implying that Schopenhauer's notion was correct that 
the form rather than the face is the main attraction. Tight lacing 
gives a relatively large appearance to the hips, and in all ages this 
has been regarded as a female allurement. An African race of 
bushmen selected females for mates with the most ridiculously 
large hips, so large in fact that when one seated herself she could 
not rise without assistance. This condition was known as steato- 
pygy. When clothing was adopted a change in attraction could 
occur from parts out of sight which would not be liable to sexual 
selection to other features not covered by clothing remaining in 



29S THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

sight. Darwin notes 25 that absence of hair on the body and its 
development on the face had much to do with sexual selection. 
A New Zealand proverb has it : "There is no woman for a hairy 
man.'' 

That music is the most powerful impeller of love in females 
is more evident than that it influences males, though women are 
the most frequent musicians, and when they cease their piano 
practice after marriage they by doing so declare that their music 
was to get the beau, and that now it is not needed so much. Liszt, 
Paderewski and other long-haired, and sometimes unintellectual 
pianists have been actually beset by females who raved over them. 
x\t the Brooklyn, New York, Academy of Music, in January, 1902, 
Kubelic, the Bohemian violinist was clawed over by a music-mad 
lot of women who prayed for a kiss or a single hair of his head. 
Hobson, the hero of Santiago, was also "hobsonized" by the girls 
till jealousy of other men put a stop to it. But this also shows 
that hero worship may centre upon some other things than musical 
ability. In either case the women have imperfectly controlled ner- 
vous systems and are emotional to a dangerous degree, particu- 
larly for their own welfare. This is an exhibition of admiration 
closely reversionary to that of birds and fishes, and hence not be- 
coming in the higher ape life. 

The loves of Goethe indicate the complex nature of the pas- 
sion. He tired of his sweethearts as soon as they were won, and 
ceased to care for them, but chivalrouslv married one to whom 
he made no promises but by whom he had a child. Charitas and 
Kathchen of Leipsic, Frederica Brion, the daughter of the pastor 
of Sessenhein, a beautiful, simple country girl to whom he made 
fierce love. "To win a heart was rapture, to possess it when won, 
satiety." According to Goethe's own record, he suddenly awoke 
to a consciousness that "his love for Frederica is but a dream, and 
when he beholds her in contrast w T ith city maids at Strasburg he 
realizes that the simple country maid is not fitted to be the life 
companion of the Goethe that is to be." Grimm says, "to have 
broken the heart of such a maiden was inhuman." Goethe thought 
little of her, did not answer her letters, and only sought a balm 
for his wounded conscience. Next was "Lotte," of the "Sorrows 

25 Descent of Man, Vol. II, p. 359. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 299 

oi Werther." She was Charlotte the betrothed of Kestner, 



Goethe's friend. She was indifferent and he had the decency not 
to bother her, but wrote of suicide. The unattainable was charm- 
ing. Thackeray wrote a parody on the "Sorrows of Werther," 
the verses ending with : "Then he blew his silly brains out and 
they placed him on a shutter. But like a well-conducted person 
she went on cutting bread and butter." 

"Lili," Frau von Stein, and finally Christine, were the later 
ones. 

In radical opposition to Goethe's method of loving there are 
men who could not stand the slightest rebuff or intimation that 
they were not liked, they would instantly give up the chase. 

Dante was married to a notorious scold, and when he was in 
exile he had no desire to see her, although she was the mother of 
his six children. Shakespeare lost the sympathies of the world 
by marrying Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior, 
who was coarse and ignorant. Lord Bacon enjoyed but little 
domestic bliss, and "loved not to be with his partner." Milton 
was not great in the character of husband and father. We read of 
him that his first wife was disgusted with his gloomy house, and 
soon ran away from him, and his daughters were left to grow 
up utterly neglected. Moliere was married to a wife who made 
him miserable, and Rousseau lived a most wretched life with his 
wife. Dryden "married discord in a noble wife," and Addison 
sold himself to a cross-grained old countess, who made him pay 
dearly for all she gave him. Steele, Sterne, Churchill, Coleridge, 
Byron and Shelley were all married unhappily, and Bulwer and 
Dickens have been known by all the world as indifferent husbands. 
Sir Walter Raleigh married a beautiful girl eighteen years his 
junior, and she adored him with increasing ardor to the very 
last. Dr. Johnson's wife was old enough to be his mother, but 
"he continued to be under the illusions of the wedding day until 
she died at the age of 64," he being only 43. Shelley's first mar- 
riage was unfortunate but his second was a model of happiness. 

Gilbert a Becket forgot his Saracen lady love, the one who 
helped him to escape, until she found him by means of the only 
two English words she knew, "London" and "Gilbert," which 
she repeated in her travels until she came to the city, and, finally, 



300 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

to her lover. These were the parents of the strenuous and vain 
Thomas a Becket. Infatuation may be one-sided or mutual, some- 
times chivalry pleads successfully where often wrong is done in 
other cases. American medical students in Vienna were con- 
stantly becoming entangled with the daughters of boarding house 
keepers and domestics ; often these young men were away from 
home for the first time in their lives. Life-long consequences 
followed sometimes with paternal chilliness, but marriages were 
more frequent than desertions of sweethearts, as in the grissette 
customs of the Latin Quarter of Paris, among students from all 
countries. 

The transient nature of the affection of Henry VIII of Eng- 
land was a phase of general hoggishness and his murderous ca- 
reer was consistent with his low nature generally. But even he 
tried to make a show of justification, and sought pretexts and 
excuses as did Nero. 

The animality of a few has brought nations to slaughter, as 
when Darius was urged to war against Greece by Atrossa, who 
wished to have Grecian women for slaves. Hunger, lust and 
plunder moved tribe against tribe and caused migration and amal- 
gamation, increase and decrease of population. The forays of 
wild animals were caused by hunger mostly, and the derived de- 
sires were added as incentives to movements of the human de- 
scendents of wild animals. The general grab instinct is at the 
root of all activity of races, however disguised. 

Monogamy may be the recognized and conventional method 
of pairing in a country and in many cases be observed ostensibly 
but not in reality, and a sense of duty and circumstances may com- 
pel it in animals as well as man. 

There are instances of constancy to the memory of a dead or 
even deserting spouse, of single love for lifetime and of extreme 
inconstancy in others. If acquired traits are transmissible, such 
as faithfulness, it is most likely to be the product of maturer mar- 
riages. For instance, if desirable traits are inheritable they are 
most likely to have been developed in riper years by both parents. 
The mating of the very young might result in offspring less likely 
to develop mental traits depending upon evolved brain states fav- 
ored by later unions. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 3OI 

The extreme range of marital methods during the ages from 
promiscuity, incest to monogamy occurs among animals as well 
as man. Cleopatra became the wife of her younger brother 
Ptolemy, according to Egyptian custom. As to loving more than 
one person at a time we have the pretense of it at least in oriental 
harems, and one after another, or one at a time, in the instances of 
widowhood and remarriages. A Turk may find a saving of 
money and worry in following the civilized monogamous method. 
Undoubtedly occasional Mussulman wives have been too jealous 
to permit another wife in defiance of the prophet's teaching. With 
oriental, occidental, white, black, brown or yellow races alike, 
jealousy reigns. Ten thousand years ago in ancient Babylon the 
courts and harems were embroiled in intrigues and treachery, in 
faithlessness and jealousies. Shakespeare's lines were as applica- 
ble then as now, when he speaks of 

"The venom clamors of a jealous woman 
Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth." 

The Hippocratic oath administered to physicians to raise them 
to a higher plane of skill and morality bound them to treat women 
with propriety. 

Among the Pennsylvania and New Amsterdam Dutch settlers 
the practice of bundling, as mentioned by Washington Irving in 
The Knickerbockers and by other writers, appears to have pre- 
vailed, and being accepted as a custom no wrong could be seen in 
it. In fact in some localities unfruitfulness was a justification for 
terminating a courtship. Individual idiosyncracies are quite com- 
mon in love relations, there are instances of complete repugnance 
of the basic exhibition associated with pure love. A gay Lothario 
who was beaten oyer the head with a club was thereafter impotent 
with any save his own wife. The mental impression rather than 
the physical beating working the change. Darwin in studying 
savage life claims that morality has been instituted by club law. 
Fear has much to do with decency and the habit once introduced 
can be intensified and finally inherited and become natural to cer- 
tain descendants. Its absence in individuals can be due to atavism 
or reversion to primitive states, just as a case of idiocy can occur 
unexpectedly in a family. 

The imagination and mental affinity at times are potent to 



302 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

build up or influence ardent attachments. Admiration is largely 
concerned in attraction, the love of approbation and mutual admi- 
ration are inducements to affection and admiration can be built 
upon being admired by another. A lady used to defend herself 
from her husband's outbursts of anger by reading his old love 
letters aloud to him. He would say that he would like to have a 
large portrait, with explanatory footnotes and a glossary of the 
inside of his head when he wrote them. One letter mentioned the 
long bitter separation of twelve hours. The "stirpiculture" non- 
sense of the Oneida community, whereby a superior race was to 
be cultivated, died out in time. Its theory was debasing and 
would have resulted in a tribe of lunatics had not nature sup- 
pressed the free love degradation. Social theorists frequently 
start with some silly sexual revolutionary notion they try to foist 
upon their dupes. The Spartan physical endurance selective pro- 
cess resulted in nothing finally. Hogs, boars, horses, oxen and 
dogs may be bred by such methods, but intellects must descend 
from better ancestry if they are to improve, and even physical 
defects may be associated with higher intelligence, as in the cases 
of Gibbon, Poe, Tom Hood and Herbert Spencer. 

Mules do not breed among themselves, although the female 
mule will occasionally produce offspring with the male horse or 
ass. Nor are hybrids mutually fertile between other members of 
the equine family. Among hybrid preferences Darwin 26 notes the 
blackbird and thrush and the black grouse and pheasant prefer- 
ring one another, and cites instances of forsaking mates for 
strange and incongruous males, as a white lady Sunday school 
teacher being smitten with a Chinese pupil. Perverted tastes are 
common to animals and man in some degree and in isolated in- 
stances. A Wyoming ranchero tells of two male cats reducing a 
forlorn and weaker Thomas to perverted submission. Darwin 
further notes that strange attachments and antipathies are formed 
more often by female domesticated and sometimes wild animals. 
A bird fancier claims that when two male canaries are placed in 
a cage with a female mating will not occur until a male is with- 
drawn. The female dotteral is a plover larger and more brilliant 
than the male and this exception to the male being the more at- 

26 Op. Cit., p. 109. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 303 

tractive is associated with stupidity, for the dotteral is so named 
because the bird foolishly allows the approach of captors. 

John D. Caton tells of the unnatural attachment of a wapiti 
deer and a Durham heifer. 27 The deer was raised with cattle and 
the heifer had not seen a bull. Both were equally attached with, 
of course, no impregnation. He also tells of a sand hill crane 
manifesting a great attraction for pigs which did not reciprocate 
the interest. A Hawaiian goose used to brood a couple of young 
pigs and protect them with fury, and they obeyed her orders with- 
out hesitation. Dudgeon, in Nature, subsequently reported the 
instance of a cat adopting five young rats. 

Closely related to perversions are other physiological miscon- 
ceptions, as when a stomach or liver irregular action induces alco- 
hol or a narcotic to be taken. There are the perverted cravings 
of pregnancy and hysteria, in the latter associated with contor- 
tions and capricious behavior. When chalk is eaten by girls it has 
been compared to the craving of chickens for calcareous sub- 
stances necessary to form their Qgg shells. This "pica/' as the 
perverted craving is called, may be an indication as well that lime 
salts are needed in bone formation, but cravings for coals and 
slate pencils, with other absurd appetites are as frequent. 

Woman has been property in all ages, her weakness invited the 
strong to capture her, just as the stronger subjugate the weak in 
all races, and regardless of sex. Where the woman was the 
stronger, either individually and exceptionally, she has been un- 
disturbed, and in a matriarchate, or where woman are governors, 
it is through circumstances that cause her to be practically 
stronger. Masculinity and muscle being reverenced the woman 
is in the background. The folly of denying the female half of the 
race any position it is competent to fill appears in expecting to 
produce an exalted and a healthy minded progeny from a race 
partly enslaved. As intelligence increases the woman is permit- 
ted to earn her own living in formerly untried ways. Her free- 
dom teaches us that she has many capabilities that were formerly 
ignored. Of course there are physiological impediments! to 
women ever filling some positions now occupied by men, but in- 
stead of refusing women advancement for such reasons let her 

27 American Naturalist, Apr. 1883, p. 359. 



304 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

try anything she desires in the way of work, and her fitness or 
unfitness will be demonstrated by natural selection. The reason 
woman is held inferior is because she had not the strength to as- 
sert herself, and for millions of years before humanity appeared 
our male animal ancestry, with occasional exceptions, have ruled 
the female. And where, as among some spiders, this was not the 
case the female spiders were the larger and stronger and prove 
the truth of my contention that the weakness of women has in 
Asiatic countries put her into harems, and only as intelligence 
and civilization advances can her masters grudgingly be induced 
to relinquish their control. In a few states of the American 
Union women suffrage has been enacted. No matter what the 
immediate results may be or how unfitted women may be to 
exercise the right to vote and to dispose of her own property, such 
legislation is a step in the right direction and eventually will 
produce results leading to a freer, more enlightened and a better 
race physically and mentally, though fears are expressed that 
priests may control the votes of their women parishioners. 

Spanish and other Latin chaperonage shows how little confi- 
dence there was in entrusting portable and perishable property 
to its own care, and Anglo-Saxon countries where such espionage 
is minimized have more trust in the honor of men and innocence 
of girls, however misplaced at times such beliefs may prove. The 
bare fact that in America there is a freedom of intercourse be- 
tween the young of both sexes with exceptional occasions for re- 
gret, and all sorts of restrictions are put upon meetings of males 
and females in Latin countries w T ith the Gil Bias and Decameron 
results quite prevalent, tend to demonstrate differences in ideas 
and salacity of races, to some extent due to climate, but also un- 
changed by conditions that might seem to favor but really repress, 
and to repress apparently but in reality to favor the illicit. The 
little respect for women in. France comes from her having no leg- 
islative champions. When she becomes able to influence votes la 
femme will be greatly advanced to a real position which now the 
politeness of the French males pretend to accord her with all in- 
sincerity and hypocrisy. 

Some "advanced" female talks of a time coming when women 
will rise against tyrant males. No matter how vilely women are 



HUNGER AND LOVE, 305 

treated such a time will never conic, for mothers and sons, and 
all the relationships o\ the sexes, even aside from sweethearts, 
will prevent such nonsense as surely as that the right and left 
hands will not fight 

Young females should not be permitted to go out into the 
world uninstructed as lambs among wolves. They are apt to get 
distorted ideas from the ignorant or designing. Like the high 
bred female dog that throws herself away on a cur of low degree 
because raised with it, so merely sitting next to one at a dining 
table may result in incongruous mating, such as was mentioned 
by ( )liver Wendell Holmes 1 ' 8 in the deformed little Bostonian 
winning the heart of the pretty young girl boarder. So circum- 
stances and opportunity are potent, and crude notions about des- 
tiny, and matches being foreordained are nonsense. 

Grumpy old Carlyle says "Love is not altogether a delirium, 
yet it has many points in common therewith," and Shakespeare's 
Rosalind says it is "a kind of madness that needs the dark house 
and the whip." It was probably the philosophical Goethe who 
suggested the lines of Schiller to the effect that until philosophy 
ruled universally the world would continue to be governed by 
hunger and love, and this all-important influence is absurdly 
avoided by metaphysicians. Turning the back upon the truths of 
nature is no way to understand them, but the people dare not think 
for themselves and hence repeat like parrots what their masters 
in state and church permit them to say, or think or read. The 
truth frightens these leaders, for it uncovers their schemes and 
threatens their grab of intellects and purses. Another piece of 
silliness is the inverting of cause and effect, as in the case of one 
demagogue physician who wrote an essay in which he took the 
ground that the desire for children was the cause of the sexual 
function, when were it not for the sexual desire the earth would 
be rapidly depopulated. 

Dr. Paulo Montegazza 20 says, among many things, good, bad 
and indifferent, that for one genius killed by love there are hun- 
dreds who owe to it their greatest inspiration ; the widower 
usually makes a good husband ; one of the characteristics of love 
is injustice; one may love more than once, the loved woman is 

a Professor at the Breakfast Table. 
a The Physiology of Love. 



306 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

always an angel, the one not loved is an ordinary female. The 
bulk of his "scientific" discourse on love is the usual rhapsodical 
sententiousness without analytical depth. Though occasionally a 
romancer will phrase what is well worth investigating, such as 
"friendship based upon past love is the most enduring," and an 
old song has it, "the world is full of beauty when the heart is full 
of love," and this is a truism based upon the general exaltation 
of the senses akin to what occurs in simple mania. Good for- 
tune may effect something of the same experience, showing that 
other things than love can produce the general feeling of well 
being, though love is more intense in its influence. Melancholia 
exhibits the direct reverse of this. The depression being general 
the world is hideous and full of suffering. The antics in novels of 
love episodes remind a naturalist of the struttings, scrapings, 
fighting for possession of the mate. The dramas, comedies and 
romances of life are classifiable under turmoil for food or mating. 
Hunger and love centralize everything we may do, and concerned 
with them is the evolution of all thought, all senses, feeling, mem- 
ory and acts of all kinds. Sometimes according to privation of one 
or the other all thought and acts may be controlled by either feel- 
ing, and all faculties may be subordinate thereto. 

Great sexual development has been associated with much men- 
tal vigor. It is the animality zest that gives force to character. 
Not that intellect is dependent upon sexual vigor, but force or 
energy, the driving power, health, strength which puts intellect 
into acts, is associated with the animal development, generally. 
Eunuchs are proverbially lazy. Some men have the lowest de- 
velopment of sexual instincts and cannot experience what i-s 
known as love, because the emotion is in higher life made up of 
too many complex elements, often the very best mental essence 
of the man. While the sexual basis normally remains the super- 
structure is often all that is seen or admitted. 

The parallels of hunger and love are in the honeymoon ban- 
quet, as savages gorge themselves and satiety follows. Indiffer- 
ence appears to follow, but it is not such, it is akin to the hungry 
man sitting down to regularity of life, and his starvation being 
over he does not realize that his hunger is steadily appeased and 
hence not urgent. "We do not miss the water till the well runs 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 307 

dry" are the words of a popular old song. Absence intensifies real 
affection and renews the hunger. But there is great variability 
in appetites, some are sparing and light eaters, others are gour- 
mands. "In the spring the young man's fancy lightly turns to 
thoughts of love," and this erethism of the season is that of the 
pairing season of the frogs and birds. All animal life is astir at 
the breeding season and every animal is at his best as a fighter, in 
general activity and intelligence. For this reason the lovelorn 
poet is "inspired," and the winsome ways of the lover are in- 
creased, and all the senses and emotions are exalted as in acute 
mania. Unpleasant things beget dislike and pleasant matters in- 
duce liking, so, other things equal, the one who can offer most of 
this world's goods has the advantage in love as in other things, 
though peculiar nooks and corners of evolution are found where 
wealth is often a great disadvantage. Certainly it does not insure 
true affection in all cases. 

An effectual answer to the possibility of any one loving twice 
in a life time occurs in multiple marriages, and as an example of 
intellectual sentiment being engaged in the passion at times may 
be called the sense of duty that survives when all else may have 
departed. The ardent attachments and murderous jealousies of 
sunny lands can be put in the category of spring awakening, 
whether annual or as in Greenland, not only annual, but intensi- 
fied by the previous six months' darkness and absence of the sun. 
Then jealousy need not be merely a sexual concern, for it may 
exist in the absence of love as an interference with property, as 
a resentment, and is then mere envy or hatred of what tends to 
dispossess. Intense ardor is infrequent in northern countries, 
and sentiment of rather an intellectual sort may cause very young 
women to prefer an old man, but the bulk of young femininity 
prefers the absence of disparity. Marriages of conveniences pro- 
duce grotesque unions at times, with unhappiness in proportion 
to the looked for enjoyment of the wealth. The illusion being 
removed the awakening has been unpleasant enough. 

When an experience arises for the first time in the life of an 
individual and it happens to be one that has perpetually arisen in 
the species at some time in the course of the individual life, such 
as recur at puberty, a love experience, for example, then the feel- 



308 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ing is accompanied by a consciousness that something like this new- 
sensation had occurred to the person ages ago. This awakening 
of an organic memory, a racial inherited inborn remembrance, can 
be best accounted for physically, chemically and developmentallw 
The organs and their attachments to the central nervous system 
gradually build up and connect with the seats of consciousness in 
the gray matter of the brain, until the machinery is adjusted, on 
the basis of what has been inherited from long lines of ancestors, 
to react to the particular impression ; it does not do so until the 
machinery is complete, and the reflexes are ready to respond, then 
the impression exerts its traditional effect as it has on millions of 
progenitors for millions of years, and organic memory recognizes 
the effect as one consonant with ages of experience, or at least 
something occurs in consciousness equivalent to an awakened 
memory, a sensation of something having taken place that is suit- 
able to the construction of the body, brain and mind. So with eat- 
ing and other functions when performed readily for the first time, 
the pleasure aroused appears to be perfectly natural and as though 
it had been experienced for ages. 

If simultaneously sensations (molecular movements recog- 
nized in consciousness) occur in separate parts of the body and 
like results ensue from the sensation in each part, such as two 
cells hungering or sexually excited at the same instant in the 
course of evolution eventually, either in the individual or the spe- 
cies, often in both, some mode of nerve communication is insti- 
tuted and centres are informed of the excitement. In this way 
all the cells would unite to exhibit that excitement in the colony 
or the individuals composing the colony, and the "nation," to 
use an analogy, would act as one man. Then if the elaborating 
eating cells, the enteric parts, came to be excited, all the rest of 
the bodv cells would feel the excitement and wake up to a realiza- 
tion of the likelihood that each other cell in all the other parts of 
the person would soon be fed. Cells also specially concerned in 
reproduction in a similar or comparable excitement could extend 
their feelings to every other cell in the body, because all cells have 
the primitive hunger and reproductive faculties. So also satiety 
or the feeling of rest accompanying the gratification in each in- 
stance. When an organism has a complex nervous system capa- 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 309 

ble of sustaining compound impressions based upon a primary 
experience thou the entire colony of cells to the remotest parts 
of the body participate in the gratification, as in the instance of 
the union of admiration, respect, gratified self-love, vanity and 
higher emotions with what is ordinarily called love. The ecstacy 
is more complete when universal. 

Mental derangements are associated with the function some- 
times in illy understood ways, for example, in the insanity of 
pubescence known as hebephrenia there is a general failure of 
the intellect to develop properly and the virility of the grown man 
appears with the silliness of the young boy, the mind has not 
grown with the body, and the self-abuse is not a cause but a con- 
sequence of this mental failure to develop ; similarly other exhibi- 
tions of the kind in children are often due to a mental cause rather 
than the abuse being the cause of the mental degradation. An 
insanity called post-connubial ceases to be mysterious when we 
regard it as an agitated melancholia from exhaustion, it promptly 
recovers as a rule with rest and absence of the exciting cause. 

Alcohol excites erotism by its direct blood intoxication or ox- 
idation of cells and alienists are much interested in the marital 
infidelity delusions of chronic alcoholic insanity. With the most 
remarkable frequency the person made insane by alcohol imagines 
that his wife is unfaithful, and sometimes murders her in that un- 
just belief. I have observed this delusion in head-injury cases in 
which there was no alcoholism. The alcoholic is also apt to think 
he is poisoned. 

Illusions and delusions are easily recognized as being caused 
by love. Faults are unobserved, beauty is seen where it is not 
and all the favored one does is approved of or condoned or even 
flagrant defects are ignored. The reverse is also true, as shown 
in the expression that "faults are thick where love is thin." 

Other mental peculiarities appear in the course of the sexual 
life and development. In the female climacteric Clouston 30 tells 
of the mental changes sometimes observed, and notes that man 
also during senility periods undergoes occasional mental revolu- 
tions. But in women the radical adjustment of the blood vessel 
system throughout the body involving both the ovaries and the 

30 Insanity, p. 388. 



3IO THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

brain, according to the resisting- power of the individual, com- 
bined with certain special liabilities to irritation and its tendency 
to manifest the irritation in certain ways, sufficiently account for 
mental aberration at this "change of life" period. The race has 
become largely proof against any particular mental or bodily dis- 
comfort following or accompanying this period, but in a few there 
is heart rapidity, timidity, deoression and change of character, 
with flushings and hot feelings. In some old maids the ardor ap- 
pears for the first time, as its basic functions are about to disap- 
pear, as though the dying of the functions created irritability of 
the related nerves and suggested ideas these women were stran- 
gers to previously. The orgasm seems like the final extension of 
participation by the general body more or less, the latent repro- 
ductive faculty in other than specialized cells is also evoked, and 
thus the supervening exhaustion and rejuvenation, the restfulness, 
mental clearness and general lavage are likewise explained. The 
relation between sexual and olfactory illusions and hallucinations 
is of clinical frequency and points to the primitive location of sex- 
ual desire in the olfactory centres, as it certainly is in many quad- 
rupeds. The optic sense, however, is the prime associate of the sex- 
ual in the developed bimana. The possibility of complete repres- 
sion of any single animal propensity would be a physiological 
study. We know that hunger can be antagonized by a starvation 
process within certain limits and excretory functions may be wo- 
fully neglected, but that the sexual appetite may be extinguished 
by religious methods is doubtful and deserves to be regarded with 
suspicion. 

The masculine orgasm is ejaculatory, excretory, and empties 
vessels concerned in retaining spermatozoa and accessory sub- 
stances, and the intensity varies greatly according to circum- 
stances. Mentality may be concerned to the extent of intensifying 
or cutting short the orgasm. Such a thing as too much affection, 
fear of consequences, etc., may repress the major exhibitions of 
the act or diminish part of the function. The mental association 
is so radical and so bound up is the entire brain in the reproduc- 
tive function that it ceases to be a mystery that the imagination 
should run riot where this faculty is concerned. Your vagrant 
thoughts on these subjects that annoy and often disgust you, are 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 



3 1 



mere inherited brain workings for which neither yon nor the 
legions of your progenitors are responsible, as all alike have ob- 
tained them from anterior animal and plant processes, and they 
from the same causes that impel hydrogen and oxygen to combine, 
or nitrogen and oxygen to flow away from each other, as states of 
environment favor the meetings and partings. The participation 
of every cell in the body in the excitement under favorable condi- 
tions, and its failure to engage but a part of the cells and nervous 
system, arise from circumstances and previous organization com- 
bined to make the sensation general or restricted. 

J. Marion Sims, the surgeon, naively narrates his courtship 
depression and exaltation. 31 When Shakespeare said that "men 
have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love," he did 
not necessarily endorse the views of one of his characters. He 
makes Ophelia a melancholiac from her love disappointment and, 
though not generally known, such griefs are among the most fre- 
quent exciting causes of insanity in those predisposed to break 
down. 

Hammond ::2 quotes Lisfranc that "man places his dignity in his 
virile organs,'' though this may be interpreted that virility, force 
of character, the powerful man, has a well developed physiology 
in its chief divisions of assimilation, etc. The woman, too, as 
such, and as a mother reaches her highest physiological develop- 
ment, and while the male develops in one way the female does in 
another and the law of differentiation determines that the two 
shall be unlike, though in what ways natural and sexual selection 
will decide, in spite of all the theorizing of those who would 
reduce woman to slavery, or those who would prefer that she 
should do all that the man can do. 

The higher the type of man and woman the more exalted will 
be their views upon all subjects, including those connected with 
basic functions, and the more complex is apt to be their love en- 
joyments and sufferings. 

The shock of a discovery of flagrante has unseated the mind. 
An instance I can recall reduced the husband to temporary demen- 
tia, his memory was gone, he did not know his own name or busi- 

My Life, J. M. Sims. 
' Insanity, p. 458. 



312 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ness, and recognizing the transient nature of this form of insanity 
I advised precautions against an outburst of fury when he recov- 
ered. He had retained some ability to be irritated when the dis- 
turbing matter was mentioned. A Minnesota editor was engaged 
to be married and the discovery was made that the person he was 
to marry was a male. The announcement unsettled the reason of 
the editor and he drank himself to death. When incompatibility 
is a plea for divorce on a discovered physical deficiency the death 
of the associated love shows at once upon what the affection rests, 
though not exclusively. The more intense the mental concern 
the higher the love, but the greater the shock of disappointment. 
A stupid person could not be so disturbed. The differences be- 
tween animals in their courtships resemble those of human affairs 
of the kind. The monogamous and the polygamous inclinations 
of species, the ferocity of some matings and the gentleness of 
others in the same genera all develop from the promiscuity of the 
ancestral stock w T hence the species were derived. Circumstances, 
accident, natural as well as sexual selection originate all the vary- 
ing accompaniments of love-making in animals and men. The 
secondary or accessory sexual peculiarities, as differences in hair 
length, presence and absence of beard, pitch of voices, scents, 
sounds, sizes, ornamentation, glandular development, horns and 
claspers among the many others that could be listed, are acquired 
additional matters that have become attractions by association or 
have been converted into means of gratification. The chemical 
desire being developed at the same time with senses to contribute 
to the desire or to comprehend it, such as the touch and smelling 
senses and later hearing and sight, and the development of these 
important special senses it is conceivable may have been largely 
due to their stimulation through sexual desire. It is demonstra- 
ble that all the special senses are modifications of the original 
tactile or touch sense and nothing could be more potent to evolve 
the special senses than the two emotions or desires, feelings, or 
sensations, as they may appear to be from various standpoints, 
those of hunger and love. The law of association is at work 
also in this development of any accessory anatomical or physi- 
ological sexual peculiarity as much as when what are unpleas- 
ant sights or sounds ordinarily may be converted into pleasant 



HUNGER AM) LOVE. 3 1 3 

ones by association with matters that are pleasant. For in- 
stance, an ugly face or harsh voice may cause the heart to leap 
for joy when the possessor of these otherwise unattractive pecu- 
liarities is loved for other reasons. 

Development of secondary sexual apparatus may take place 
in startling ways, the claspers of the ray are homologous with 
quite different organs of the mammal. 33 H. I. Gorman 34 claims 
that the phosphorescence of the lampyridse originates in sexual at- 
traction of females for the males. Undoubtedly colors, scents, 
sounds and illumination are demonstrably for sexual attraction 
in insect, fish, and other animal life, to a great degree. Darwin 15 
mentions the secondary sexual characters of birds. In the male 
elephant two orifices in the forehead exude a tarry substance when 
the sexual madness or fury seizes the mad male, at certain seasons 
of the year. The male mud turtle has larger claws apparently for 
clasping purposes in union. A warty protuberance is developed 
on the thumb of the male frog during the breeding season to assist 
in holding the female, and in some species the whole fore-arm be- 
comes enlarged at this time. The axis of each pelvic fin of the 
shark is developed into a "clasper" connected with the reproduc- 
tive functions. 36 Rays also have these claspers. Ancient fossil 
sharks had no claspers, so this is a later sexual development and 
bears upon association in evolution conferring additions and mod- 
ifications upon the sexual methods, and even desires, so as to rad- 
ically change them. Urodela amphibians have prehensile claws 
during the breeding season. The hind foot of the Triton aids in 
pursuit of the female and is absorbed during the winter. The 
human sebaceous glands at puberty and during or before men- 
struation become enlarged and many young people of about 
eighteen years of age are greatly mortified at this advertisement 
on their faces of their continence, which they consider unsightly, 
but to a physician indicates quite probable innocence, even though 
ignorance is not always the same thing. The odoriferous glands 
•on the nose of the deer are akin to these human blemishes. The 

33 American Naturalist, Oct. 1886. p. 904. 

34 Journal of Royal Microscopical Society, Oct. 1880. 
"Descent of Man, Vol. II, p. 36. 

"Lydeker, Natural History, Vol. V, p. 520. 



314 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

antelope has a gland under each eye and the wild-beeste also, 
marked by hair tufts. These are peculiar to the males and are 
checked by castration. Skunks and goats if castrated young do 
not have their usual odor. The musk of the male deer in con- 
nection with their herds running up the wind enable locating of 
their kind. The castoreum of the beaver is a powerful heart stim- 
ulant. The fox of India has not the strong scent of the European 
fox, so hounds cannot follow the first so well. During the mating 
season the crocodile gives off a musky odor from submaxillary 
glands. 

The primary ancestral attraction is in the germ and sperm cells 
like that of hydrogen for oxygen, and all the secondary apparatus 
have developed or evolved to facilitate this juncture of these ele- 
mentary organs, the germ and sperm cell, and acute sensations 
accumulated step by step through association as the sensory ap- 
paratus became more complex, but no matter how intricate and 
how multiple the organs and feelings involved the primary in- 
stinct remains as the base of the highest and most complicated 
exhibitions of the passion, and the atomic preferences lie still 
deeper and behind all of it, the intense molecular affinities are 
the causes of cell attraction and molecules are built up by atoms 
that prefer other atoms, and appear unable to exist singly and 
apart from one another, so that if unlike atoms cannot be secured, 
two atoms of the same elementary nature will associate in prefer- 
ence to being alone, and this could be the basis of gregariousness 
of plants and animals, in spite of temporary solitary roamers and 
apparent segregation. A complete separation would mean de- 
struction of the species, so inherently all life is gregarious. As 
the kidneys, liver, stomach and related organs. have been evolved 
to facilitate assimilation, in its last analysis it is merely the inter- 
change of molecules and atomic construction of molecules that 
constitutes assimilation or eating. No more nor less is the union 
of the ovum and spermatozoon. 

Attraction, however, may not be mutual between individuals 
of opposite or the same sex, any more than that the molecules 
of all compounds can unite with those of other compounds. Some 
atoms are comparatively inert, as are certain molecular combina- 
tions. One of the most indifferent combinations is the sulphate 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 315 

of barium. The sexes may repel one another or one be distaste- 
ful to the other until the requisite, sometimes unknown, change 
occurs that enables attraction to be mutual. It is well known to 
chemists that an atom a may not care for the atoms b or c, but 
when b and c are united in one molecule a may be irresistably 
drawn to that molecule. 

The law of battle between males for possession of the females 
may he likened to the molecular or atomic clash in their rush for 
combination, where one compound exceeds or is stronger than 
the 1 ther, so the battle being to the strong in natural selection 
is also based upon the greater force of these chemical ultimates. 

The change of cartilage into bone may be used to explain the 
development of the ova and its attractiveness for the spermatozoa. 
When a tissue has reached a certain stage of chemical develop- 
ment so it may take up further compounds and cause the structure 
to become more complex or change its constituents, then a step in 
organization takes place. Thus a may have affinity for b and a b 
for c, but if a has not b it cannot combine with c. So the unripe 
ovum a does not unite with the spermatozoon c until the a b stage 
is reached. Until certain glandular structures are built that have 
affinities for animal and vegetable tissues, there can be no attrac- 
tion between the intestine and its contents, the food and the ani- 
mal that eats it. Immature organs will not assimilate ripe fruit 
nor can unripe fruit be assimilated by the fully organized diges- 
tive apparatus, but when both the alimentary canal and the food 
are united to one another then digestion can occur, as the com- 
pleted ova and spermatozoa combine. 

In some ways the ova and spermatozoa may be regarded as 
parasites which chemically develop as embryo upon the tissues' of 
their parents, the hosts, through being furnished with the essen- 
tials for a speedy development, where in the evolution of the spe- 
cies these same chemical elements in the environment instead of 
in the parent (the environment of the embryo) were slowly and 
with difficulty taken up to build one animal higher than another. 

If A develops into B and then C, the germ and sperm cells of 
A afford a with affinity for b and c which pabulum they find 
already in the tissues at hand. Post-natal life carrying on the 



316 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

process through adapted food which at first is maternal milk, 
merely nutriment derived from the blood of the parent. 

The male and female elements are complementary compounds 
which when mature have affinities, their immature, unbuilt mol- 
ecular structure have not. One may be of an acid nature and an- 
other an alkaline and when finally ready to unite the higher and 
complete organic compound is built to enable further higher mole- 
cular construction, and even to the last the adult man may be re- 
garded as a molecule with compound affinities, but fundamentally 
they are the same as those of the cells. 

In organisms that have no sex (asexual) the single cell may 
suffice to build up all the molecule, but the male and female ele- 
ments may exist in the same animal and constitute that animal 
asexual and hermaphroditic, but it is a mere step in the forma- 
tion of separate sexes. 

Another view would be that the molecular causes the cellular 
attraction in the lowest life but where that attraction is com- 
pounded by association with secondary organs and senses, the 
parent or entire organism may be also attracted, if not fixed as are 
plants, and much animal mobility is built upon the primitive sex- 
ual attraction. 

In plant fertilization we cannot conceive of such a thing as a 
plant having a desire for the other sex. The union of the two 
sexual elements is apparently by chance but nevertheless their 
sex elements have affinities for one another. 

So the plant desire resides in its sex elements, the seed and 
pollen, and is chemical though the entire plant may be grown 
upon an adjustment to pollen and seed union and distribution. 
The union, however, due to winds, birds or insects, appears to 
be independent of the plant, though in reality these accessory 
methods of fertilization are what causes the plant to survive, and 
hence these seemingly accidental means of plant propagation are 
as natural as other methods more obviously so. 

A bisexual animal could develop into a unisexual through 
environment changes, and a unisexual animal would develop from 
the double sexcd, through one sexual organ in such animal de- 
veloping more than th? other sexual organ. For example, if an 
ovary and testes, or their equivalents, were contained in the same 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 317 

animal, some of these animals would develop better ovaries, and 
others better testes, and imperfect other sexual organs, just as 
rudimentary accessory apparatus, such as the clitoris and nipples 
are atrophic vestiges pf a bisexual state in both man and woman. 
Sometimes hermaphrodism persists through one ovary and one 
testicle being preserved to greater or less degree, and inversion 
of sex could be based upon accessory organs being wrongly devel- 
oped, as those of a male appearing in a female, as the beard or 
other feature, or mamma? being large in a male. 

Reproductive organs in higher animals, especially the testes 
and ovaries, may merely be developed to take from the circula- 
tion such chemical pabulum as may be concerned in the forma- 
tion of the embryo. For instance, the lime salts in the cloaca of 
the hen are there ready when the time arrives for the membrane 
to attach itself thereto, and so may every other specialized process 
be similarly carried on by ovaries, etc., and the organs may be 
divided into chemical and mechanical, the latter for conveying 
purposes. Embryological and phylogenetic development copy one 
another. In the latter substances in the environment are utilized 
for which the animal has affinities, and the tissues embryologically 
seek out these same substances in the circulation. If the affinity 
persists by heredity it would be natural for certain salts and other 
chemical pabulum to be attracted to the embryo just as is the case 
phylogenetically. Butchli and Pfeffer's researches concerning 
moss and fern spermatozoid affinity for malic acid, etc., are im- 
portant as showing the the chemical nature of the genetic origin. 

The reason why the separation of sexes occurs is that cells 
that tend to undergo higher differentiation have the greater at- 
traction for the sexual cells than when undifferentiated. The 
higher developed sexual cell has a greater attractive influence 
than appears in the relatively low organism and hence sexual 
selection and heredity begin down close to atomic combinations, 
if they are not also the direct cause of selection and heredity. 

Dr. Van de Corput ?, ~ notes the diminution of virile power 
through antiseptics as salicylic acid, quinine, menthol, carbolic 
acid, seeming to act on the blood elements and sexual cells as on 
inferior organisms. Spermatozoids become in effect completely 

" Revue de Therapeutique. Brussels. 1901. 



318 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

immobile, under the microscope, like all the leucocytes, which 
lose their amoeboid movement and can no longer migrate. Sali- 
cylic acid acts in the same manner upon the ovary and causes the 
lengthening of the intermenstrual period. 

The fusion or splitting of one animal into two is practicallv all 
there is in reproduction and an extension of life of the original 
individuals into duplicates or improved forms constitutes a sort 
of prolonged life, a relative immortality, the senile part, the ances- 
tor, dying. 

This continuity of the organic life of the parent with that of 
the germ and the sperm cell offspring is discussed by many biol- 
ogists. Thompson's "Animal Life" gives a summary of the va- 
rious theories such as pangenesis and mentions the theory which 
regards the cells of reproduction as continuous with and as old as 
the parent. But the germ is in organic evolution something more 
than the ancestral germ, because there have been changes of envi- 
ronment and growth that have added to the structure and possi- 
bilities in the evolutionary scale from the very beginning in inver- 
tebrate forms and upward from and through the lemur or half- 
ape stage to man. Instead of pangenesis we would have ovular 
potencies latent, developing in the suitable environment, that 
which afforded the necessary chemical substances for growth. 
The yelk stands for the placenta, for all that either can do is to 
afford nutriment so arranged chemically as to build up tis- 
sues for the foetus. The cells develop and change at the proper 
time and thus the entire infant is formed on principles which 
build up symmetrical crystaline molecules. So the ovary and 
ovum merely localize the reproductive function which inheres in 
every cell of the body, from the highest to the very lowest or- 
ganisms. Pangenesis is further not necessary for if the ovaries 
are high elaborations of cells which can readily draw the con- 
stituents for further development, directly from the blood, or other 
fluids, as the seed draws from the soil, and we observe the nutri- 
tion needed for budding or fission in low animal life to be directly 
abstracted from the nutriment fluids of the animal without the 
intervention of the ovary, which is evolved to afford this abstrac- 
tion and growth to a better degree. Specialization abbreviates all 
the other functions but the reproductive in genetic cells, the ten- 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 3 in 

dency being for many colls to develop in certain special directions. 
The special function of reproduction being highly developed in 
certain cells, though belonging to all cells in less degree. It can 
be inferred from ovular segmentation being similar to cell pro- 
liferation generally, that nutritional processes for the ova are de- 
rived from and are essentially the same as those of the bod}', and 
tracing all these methods of increase downward, the same uni- 
versal laws of assimilation, growth and splitting apply. 

Meroblastic segmentation is the incomplete method as in 
fowls and most fishes. Holoblastic is where the segmentation is 
complete. And there is a vast nutritive importance in the food 
yelk, as a reservoir from which further molecular building up oc- 
curs in regular order, as one chemical substance created enables 
another to be taken up, the yelk affording the materials to the 
embryo, as the soil, water and air does to the seed of the plant. 

Interbreeding fails to present the molecular differences which 
the evolving types need for their advancement, and it may be set 
down as a rule that if interbreeding does not cause deterioration 
it is because the organism is low in the scale, and is not in the rap- 
idly advancing series. 

Darwin shows that plants produced from the pollen of one 
flower applied to the pistil of another are stronger and more vig- 
orus than plants produced from stamens and ovules of a single 
blossom. This cross fertilization is what by natural and sexual 
selection eventuated sexual genesis from hermaphrodism. Two 
plants self fertilized would occupy an inferior place botanically 
to plants cross fertilized even though capable of self fertilization, 
until finally habit and development would determine the fertilizer 
and fertilized plants apart, and start plants with single sexes. 
The ovules of one and pistils of the other plants, the ovaries of 
the one and testes of the other animal becoming atrophied and de- 
termining the sexes of living organisms. 

Corn when self fertilized is not as good as when cross fertil- 
ized. Self fecundating animals may accidentally become cross 
fecundating and thus improve upon the previous hermaphroditic 
method, just as plants may thus evolve, and an advantage is origi- 
nated and perpetuated by the labor division. 



320 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

J. C. Arthur 88 affirms that "any cause which retards develop- 
ment of an animal or plant favors reproduction. Rather that 
the organism will develop the reproductive parts of its structure 
faster and more fully than the other parts, and in the case of crops 
the yield of seed will be greater proportionately than of the leaves 
and stems." This can account for the salacity of imbeciles and 
some other insane. The intensity of animal passion that bursts 
forth in some uncultured races and in the weak minded menaces 
communities at times, but the usual natural selection process is 
extermination by mob law. 

The intensity of the eel ardor has made it notorious. They 
exhaust themselves in breeding and the old eels die. Its ancestry 
without very definite nervous connections of their cells could not 
have the reproductive desires of its various elements so well as- 
sociated. The eel being an early vertebrate with its somites or 
segments related by a nervous system, general co-ordinated activ- 
ity and a keener response would follow as compared with organ- 
isms not so well provided with nerves and central co-ordinating 
apparatus. The eel pot tenacity of intertwining suggests that in 
his adolescing form, phylogenetically speaking, the awakened ar- 
dor of puberty in the boy affords an ontogenetic comparison. 
With him the nerve relations are -practically established for th# 
first time and the "heavens are brass" till the desire is appeased, 
and the young need more scientific supervision at this time than 
before, or later, though they will continue to be turned loose like 
other animals, often lambs among wolves. Daughters especially 
need oversight and careful, proper instruction. 

A spinal injury or an irritation in the upper part of the spinal 
cord where the erector centre is situated may cause painful and 
chronic priapism, thus indicating another secondary sexual acces- 
sory for correlating purposes. 

In the building up of nervous tracts those concerned in food 
procuring are the most prominent and next follow those relating 
to sexual functions, and to a great extent the rest of the nervous 
system is merely superimposed and associated with these. One 
feeling excluding all others, for the time being, as fear, hunger, 

38 Deviation in Development Due to Unripe Seeds, American Natural- 
ist, Oct. 1895, P- 9°4- 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 32 1 

sexual desire, indicates how the entire brain may be tributary to 
each division, so from this could he argued the absence of special 
centres in the brain for such feelings, and just as the same mus- 
cles may contribute to varied needs and wants, so the same nerv- 
ous distribution may answer to first one, and then another instiga- 
tion or desire conveying to consciousness the sensations from the 
viscera that are known as emotions and other feelings that are 
not usually classified as emotions. 

Plants and animals, however varied and seemingly developed, 
are made up of the cells that are common to all living things, just 
as hovels or palaces may alike be built of bricks, and similarly the 
cellular functions remain the same in highest and lowest, as the 
rich are made like the poor. Let the basic organs be defective and 
a post marital discovery thereof be made, the divorce proceedings 
reveal upon what domestic happiness is built. 

The United States Fish Commission reports tabulate some 
facts as to marine animals that enable deductions as to evolution- 
ary development: The right whale gestation period is one year. 
Most seals are polygamous and fight for harems. The unsuccess- 
ful seals are bachelors. Cod ova must come in contact with the 
milt very soon or they will not develop. Surf fishes are vivipar- 
ous. Pike rub one another violently and deposit their spawn with 
violent blows of their tails. White fish have strong sexual ardor, 
chasing each other and emit spawn when vents are approximated. 
They are probably monogamous. Carp are probably polyandrous 
as three males will follow the female when she is spawning. Pos- 
sibly when eggs are more numerous among white carp more than 
one milter is required to impregnate the ova. Salmon leave the 
sea and spawn in fresh water often dying there, while eels seek 
the sea to spawn. Oysters emit both ova and spermatozoa which 
apparently meet as plant elements do so that sexual desire in such 
degenerate forms would be allied to the excretory more than to any 
higher or complicated feelings. Sturgeons lay enormous numbers 
of minute eggs, one female numbering three million during a 
season. The lobster places his double member into the outer gen- 
ital opening, and the eggs are impregnated while yet in the ovary, 
and are emitted immediately after. Among all animals the num- 
ber of mates are determined by circumstances of strength, conven- 



322 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ience, salacity, and finally a custom is soon established. Pond 
snails are viviparous and the young are born with shells and start 
out independently at once. Some gastropods are unisexual. Chi- 
tons are bisexual, but like the limpets are destitute of certain 
functional organs. Moss animals are hermaphroditic, and the 
male and female elements mingle freely together in the body fluids, 
and these low forms of life afford stepping places to the higher 
single sexed animals by natural selection developing separate 
sexes in their descendants. The fresh water mussels have the sexes 
united in European species, and distinct in the American species. 
In early life they are parasitic and the eggs are hatched in the 
gills of the parent and develop into minute bivalves which attach 
themselves by a byssal thread to any object and later to the gills 
and to other parts of fishes, and finally sink to assume the parent 
form. The amphioxus generally, but not invariably, lays eggs in 
fresh water and they are fertilized as they are extruded from the 
female. Frogs and toads have lengthened larval habits, the tad- 
pole has a globular head and fish like tail. Adults are nocturnal. 
The spawn of the frog rises to the surface in glairy masses and 
is devoured in large amounts by newts and fishes. Salmon spawn 
is at once fecundated by milt at intervals, and the fertilization adds 
greatly to the specific gravity of the eggs which sink and are cov- 
evered with gravel by the tail of the female. In 120 to 140 days, 
according to the temperature, the eggs hatch. The adult males are 
great cannibals and feed upon their own offspring. The males also 
fight fiercely with each other when attending the females. Wras- 
ses produce living young contained in the sheath of ovaries 
instead of the oviduct. Ctenophora are hermaphroditic 
and Hydras reproduce if cut in pieces, the lost parts of each 
piece are regenerated. Besides developing sexually there 
is among sponges a "vegetation propagation." Sponge sper- 
matozoa have conical heads and long vibratile tails formed 
from the male cells by division of the nucleus. The ova 
are large rounded cells which after fertilization undergo 
segmentation. The embryos are minute oval bodies about the size 
of a pin's head. After a couple of days' independent existence 
they are thrown out of the craters or oscules and they become 
fixed. Polar bears bring forth their young beneath the snow. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 323 

Nineteen months is the average period of gestation in elephants 
and from 18 to 2$ months in some. One offspring is born at a 
time. Some reptiles are oviparous and others viviparous while 
some are both. 

There may be degeneracy of one or the other sex among low 
forms of life to a state of mere parasitism in which the degenerate 
animal apparently performs no other than a sexual function, as in 
Rotifera. 39 Protozoa are sexless and among the ccelenterata the 
Hydromedusse sexes are distinct usually, and are traced back to 
asexual ancestors from which the gonophores arise, with occa- 
sional exceptions. The Medusae are higher unisexual. Chrysaora 
are hermaphroditic. Vermes are greatly varied sexually. Oviducts 
of Gephyrean Bonellia contain microscopic degenerate males. So 
that the male has shrunken up and reverted to the original sper- 
matozoon state. The simplest origin of sponge element cells, here 
and there from ova and spermatozoa, may throw light on their 
chemical origin, these cells being situated where special organs and 
inorganic compounds develop them. 40 The pedalian rotifer male is 
a veritable dwarf, compared to the female. Some male spiders are 
smaller than the female who may devour her mate after the mari- 
tal repast, thus confusing the desires of hunger and love. 

M. R. Quinton 41 thinks that the different modes of reproduc- 
tion, oviparous, marsupial and viviparous, are the consequences of 
the cooling of the globe. Life appeared at the high temperature 
with so-called "cold blooded" animals that have undergone adap- 
tation, that now, as then, determines an equality between their in- 
ternal temperatures and that of the medium in which they live. 
Incubation and viviparous gestation come from using the animal's 
own heat, and hence mammals and birds follow the reptile ages. 
Manv fishes do not copulate. The amphioxus possesses the ear- 
liest trace of a penis. 42 Leeuwenkoek regarded the spermatozoon 
as a parasite when he first observed it, and the spermatazoid of 
von Siebold, and the fila spermatica of Kolliker are the same or- 
ganism under different names. It absorbs nutriment from envir- 

39 Encyc. Britt., Vol. XXI, p. 720, Article Sex. 

40 Op. Cit, Vol. XX, p. 407, Article Reproduction. 

41 Quoted by Coues, 1897. 

42 Encyc. Britt., Vol. XX, p. 410. 



324 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

oning tissues and its chemical analysis is given. 4 "' Though they 
are cold blooded, frogs and toads have strong passions, sometimes 
a female toad is smothered by being hugged to death by three or 
four males. 

Were the seminal material made from elements concerned in 
physiological energy, so-called vitality, it would appear that when 
their further manufacture were ended there would be increased 
activity in the animal as the supply would be furnished other parts 
of the body, the gelding would be more active than the stallion 
but aside from the irritation and spur to activity the seminal func- 
tion affords, the lessening of the reproductive function not only in 
the main organs but throughout the cells of the body would ab- 
stract just so much energy and in many cases tends to plethora and 
increased general growth with laziness. Some dogs and cats and 
occasionally boys who have been altered grow large and lethargic. 
Among orientals there are three kinds of eunuchs, one kind have 
the virile member cut off, in another only the scrotum is taken 
away, and the complete sort have the scrotum and all cut off. In 
both the first and third a small silver tube is used for micturition. 
It is claimed that where the scrotum alone, with its contents, is 
destroyed the erections continue, but without orgasm and in any 
case where ablation of testes is made after puberty the sexual de- 
sire remains though ungratified. Once experienced the nervous 
adjustment and organic memory is aroused in the spinal cord and 
brain, and is never forgotten. It is quite probable that castration 
of the young before the passion is aroused can be followed by dor- 
mancy of desire and its extinction. One testicle cut off has in- 
creased the erethism, and it often occurs that after ovariotomy 
women suffer from nymphomania where previously they had been 
as continent as any lady could be. The complementary nature of 
growth and reproduction is seen in the large size attained by the 
altered dog and similar instances in other animals. Growth pre- 
cedes reproduction in the lowest to the highest organisms and 
when the latter function is suppressed the growth may become ex- 
cessive but the mere excitement following the inflammatory pro- 
cesses after amputations from the stump of nerves and vessels con- 

43 Ibid, p. 411. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 325 

veying sensations to nerve centres is not to be confused with the 
normal conditions. But that the secondary accessory organs may 
act to some degree independently is seen in prostatic fluid or vagi- 
nal mucus ejaculations sans testes et ovaries. At a certain period 
^\ development when molecules are adjusted, "ripe," for further 
assimilation, puberty, a certain food present, other molecules to 
construct ovaries and testes and their contents are arranged or 
built up. Previous to this the capacity for uniting had not been 
reached. A + B + C + D and so on must proceed onward to the 
X stage before Y and Z can be taken up. So whether the male 
element rests in the unisexual or bisexual individual the higher 
food is assimilable only after certain development is reached, just 
as infantile glands must appear before solid food is acceptable. 

That inbreeding causes degeneracy and mixed stock thrives 
best, within limits, and that also, within limits, like attracts un- 
like, have been repeatedly observed. An explanation may lie fun- 
damentally in the radical and base compounds forming the strong- 
est affinities, as alkalines and acids, and molecular compounds of 
the same kind are less attracted than where, within a certain range, 
differences exist. Chemical differences of species are most likely 
to accrue, through difference of environment, and, unless these 
changes are too radical, a better and more stable chemical physio- 
logical structure would arise by such union, as where ions are far- 
thest apart positively and negatively, but sexual selection will de- 
cide the limits and modifications of this electro-chemical analogy. 

Going upon the supposition that the spermatozoids of crypto- 
gamic plants must be attracted to the female cells by means of 
some emanations from the latter acting as appropriate stimuli to 
the former, Prof. Pfeffer of Tubingen tried at random a large 
number of chemical solutions, in order to find if any of them 
would succeed in attracting the spermatozoids. Eventually he 
found that spermatozoids of certain ferns are infallibly attracted 
by a solution of malic acid, so that if a pipette be filled with this 
solution and dipped into a watch glass of fluids containing the 
spermatozoids, the latter will crowd from all parts of the fluid 
into the pipette. Now, as malic acid occurs in the ferns, it is easy 
to see how natural selection may have utilized this substance for 
the purpose of guiding spermatozoids to female cells : survival of 



326 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

the fittest can very well have acted on the spermatozoids through 
the countless generations — always favoring those to which malic 
acid acted in any degree as a stimulus, until malic acid now consti- 
tutes an unfailing attraction. Yet, if so, there need never have 
been any "psychic life" in the matter; the spermatozoids are to 
their physiological correlatives in a manner as purely ''mechan- 
ical" as particles of water are elsewhere. 

Pfeffer also found that cane sugar and malic acid acted differ- 
ently on the spermatozoids of ferns and mosses. Conferva? sper- 
matozoids are attracted only by cane sugar. Similar substances 
such as glucose or milk sugar have no influence. 44 Binet 45 notes 
that the spermatozoid and the ovule repeat on a small scale what 
the two individuals do on a large scale. The spermatozoid goes 
in quest of the female element. It owns organs of locomotion the 
ovule does not have. Often the organ is a long tail which is whip- 
ped in a conical direction and moves the spermatozoid forward. 
The same occurs in Algae and mastigophores which are armed 
with flagella, an undulatory membrane like a fin moves the sperm 
cell of the Triton and Axolotl. The spermatic element is animated 
by the same sexual instinct of the parent organisms. In the hen 
the oviduct may be 60 centimeters long "and in large mammals half 
as long, and the frail and minute sperm cells are carried along 
these tracks irresistibly. Henle has seen them carry along with 
them masses of crystals ten times larger than themselves without 
lessening their speed. Ponchet and Balbiani have seen them carry 
eight to ten blood globules, a volume double that of the head of 
the spermatozoid, four or five times heavier than itself. In the case 
of a star-fish one spermatozoid outstrips others in the race and ar- 
rives near the vitellus or protoplasm of the ovule, the outside of 
which is seen to lift up in the shape of a little projection or cone, 
which glues to the head of the spermatozoid and draws it into the 
interior, leaving the tail outside, and the ovule rejects all other 

44 Pfeffer, Untersuchungen ans dem botanischen Institut zu Tubingen. 

Vol. I, Leipzig, 1884, p. 363 ; commented upon by Ribot, Psycho- 
logic Allemande, p. 161. and Binet. Psychic Life of Micro- 
organisms, Open Court translation, 1889, p. 86. 

45 Binet, Op. Cit, p. 77- 



HUNGER AND LOVE, 327 

male elements by forming a hard envelope. So the law of sexual 
selection applies to the minutest sexual elements. 

Balbiani and Gruber* 8 say of micro-organisms it is as true as of 
all other animals the act of coition is preceded by activity for a 
long time. Among the ciliated Infusoria, as well as other micro- 
scopic life, "the female when pursued by the male seems under 
two conflicting desires, that of yielding to and of repelling his 
approaches." This show of unwillingness which is but temporary 
and more seeming than real, excites the male to captivate the 
female. Espinas claims there are five classes of phenomena pre- 
paratory to sexual union ; firstly, provocation contact, the lowest 
of all these ; secondly, odor ; thirdly, color and form ; fourthly, 
noise and sound ; fifthly, play or every variety of movement. And 
human love demonstrations could be also included in such catego- 
ries. During the conjugation the two ciliated Infusoria are always 
joined together at the mouth aperture for from twenty-four to 
thirty-six hours in Paramecium aurelia, and five or six days in 
Paramcecium bursaria, then little by little they shift until they 
meet length to length but still bucally joined. The changes ef- 
fected appear to be confined to the nucleus and nucleolus. The 
physiological condition of the nucleus excites the Infusoria to 
copulate. Parasites in the nuclei destroy the sexual function. 

The attractive principle in the human instance will be isolated 
by future chemical research along Pfeffer's lines. There is acetic 
acid in the vagina but whether this has any combining influence 
upon the alkaline spermatic fluid has not been ascertained, at 
times there are cravings for vinegar pickles, but its significance is 
usually blended with the pica of hysteria, as the love of chalk, etc. 

In an account of the manufacture of nitro-glycerine 47 in Scot- 
land, the beauty of the girls in the factories is ascribed to the clear- 
ness of skin caused by breathing the fumes of the compounds, and 
you also learn that the girls marry quickly after entering the fac- 
tory. The workers are more than usually romantic in their ten- 
dencies "and enquiring Pickwicks have taken may notes thereupon 
in which the statistics of marriage and population are not entirely 
neglected." 

" ; Archives de Zoologie Experimentale, 1873, Vol. II. 
47 McClure's Magazine. Aug. 1807, H. W. Dam. 



328 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Nitro-glycerine acts as a heart stimulant and also as an aphro- 
disiac. It is probable that most organic compounds of the recent 
therapeutic restorative kind have these properties of nitro-glycer- 
ine, and further corroborate theories of vital chemistry. 

Densities of sperm differ, the frog's fecundated eggs rise to the 
surface of the water, while those of the salmon sink to the bottom 
of the stream, and the male elements differ in density otherwise. 
Both testes and ovaries may remain in the abdomen of birds and 
reptiles, but in mammals the scrotum is pendulous and holds the 
testes which gradually descend into it in the course of develop- 
ment, except in the instance of defective descent, as cryptorchid- 
ism or hermaphofdism. The yelk of the egg is stored up mate- 
rial upon which the chick may build up further, and the ovary 
merely abstracts from the blood at the proper instant and sequence 
the necessary chemical substances needed to lift the embryo 
higher in the evolutionary scale. Fishes that descend to the sea to 
spawn are rare. The eels do so, showing marine origin. Most 
fishes either slowly or rapidly ascend rivers from the sea to lay 
eggs, while others cannot leave the sea or the fresh water in which 
they live. 

In many animals and some low savages the basic desire does 
not appear to have associated sentiments which among civilized is 
called love, which varies w T ith individuals and often consists of 
higher affection as sympathy of various sorts, admiration, the 
play instinct, vanity, the feeling of ownership, the gregarious in- 
stinct and later combined with joint ownership of children in the 
parental feelings, etc. The Sandwich islanders did not know what 
was meant by virtue and regard it as meanness. Morality was un- 
known to them and promiscuity is in their case seen to be common 
to this type of savage though other South Sea islanders have de- 
veloped beyond this low animal stage, but it is not necessary to go 
back to animals to trace the rudiments of marital union. All sorts 
of matings may be seen among peoples ordinarily regarded as 
monogamous. There may be polyandry, polygamy and promis- 
cuity, and rapid divorces sometimes disguise conditions from those 
unaccustomed to think except superficially. The occasional com- 
plete separation of all sentiment from the mere sexual act is plainly 
evident in the case of a female detective luring a person to arrest 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 329 

or an entrapment for blackmailing purposes. The desire for gain 
may predominate in the marriage of convenience. ( )utrages a*re 
reversions to the earliest methods among aborigines and fear was 
the principal emotion on the part of the passive subject. 

Examine an ascending scale of animals and the reproductive 
organs will be seen to have developed from the intestinal tract. 
The bird still uses the common cloaca for its Qgg exit and the 
Fallopian tubes or oviducts enlarge at their lower ends and finally 
join to form the uterus, as the aorta is from fixed arteries that are 
separate in the unborn and in our progenitors, and as the bladder 
is also built up from enlarged and fused ureters. The partly dou- 
ble uterus of the cat family shows incomplete development in this 
direction, the bicorned uterus of the felidse. 

Even in human beings the sympathetic nerves control indiffer- 
ently the colon and uterus so that tenesmus and uterine conges- 
tion are associated and a drug like aloes will act to some ex- 
tent upon the general pelvic sympathetic uterine as well as colic 
distributions, indicating the primitive relationship of the reproduc- 
tive and intestinal organs. The apposition of ani observed in birds 
and reptiles would develop the accessory organs, as the sting of 
some insects becomes the ovipositor of others and helps to place 
eggs in their resting places in the tree or ground, and the shark 
claspers later becoming a penis or clitoris, the latter being a mere 
homologous rudiment. The passive ovum attracting the more ac- 
tive semen could through vast ages build up the erectile male or- 
gan to carry the sperm nearer the tgg. 

We are accustomed to regard offspring as copies of their 
parents and this is quite the customary result of pairing and is 
called homogenesis, or the male or female children resembling 
the parents. But there are other methods of genesis one of which 
is known as heterogenesis when the plant or animal fails to re- 
semble its parents but may resemble its grandparents, and still an- 
other form may resemble neither ancestor. Gamogenesis is the 
name of generation by sexual union. Agamogenesis is where there 
is no sexual union necessary to produce offspring. That is, the 
child may have but one parent. Homogenesis, or like males and 
females producing similar males and females as offspring is uni- 
versal among vertebrates and most invertebrates. Viviparous 



33° TIIE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

genesis is where the young are born alive and oviparous where the 
egg is first laid. Where propagation is by heterogenesis there is 
always absence of sexual union with occasionally recurring sex- 
ual genesis, agamogenesis interrupted by gamogenesis. Huxley's 
classification of development is that it is either continuous by 
growth or metamorphosis, or it is discontinuous by gamogenesis 
or agamogenesis, and this last is divisible into metagenesis or par- 
thenogenesis. Where reproduction is from no special organ but 
from the body direct it is metagenesis and this may be from out- 
side or inside the body and hence called external and internal met- 
agenesis. Von Siebold defines the parthenogenesis as the power 
possessed by certain females of producing offspring without sex- 
ual union with a male. An artificial but rather dubious partheno- 
genesis is claimed, that is a chemical impregnation that will take 
the place of the male element. 48 There are other divisions which 
are well demonstrated, these are the pathological, occasional, sea- 
sonal, juvenile and total. In three distinct sets of animals, rotifers, 
crustaceans and insects, parthenogenesis is a confirmed habit. An 
instance of the pathological is known in surgery as the dermoid 
cyst, a tumor containing teeth, hair, bones, etc., an imperfect foetus, 
growing in an unimpregnated person. 

Parthenogenesis is agamogenesis carried on in a special repro- 
ductive organ or the semblance of one by false ova. That is, while 
there are regular organs in many animals and plants in which the 
reproductive, process, homogenesis by gamogenesis, can be carried 
on, there are degenerate organisms with rudimentary ovaries or 
testes or their equivalents in whom development proceeds to a cer- 
tain stage for offspring without the male parent contributing to 
the generative material. Agamogenesis with occasional gamogen- 
esis resulting in heterogenesis with occasional homogenesis, indi- 
cates the influence of a change of environment upon a low type of 
life, so that regular sexual union had developed with offspring 
resembling the parents, but the ancestral hermaphroditic method 
of generation would recur with offspring still further reversionary 
or resulting a generation further back, owing to the lifting influ- 
ence not being constant or sufficiently strong to overcome the 

48 Geddes and Thompson, The Evolution of Sex, Humboldt Series, 
N. Y., 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 33 1 

older methods of propagation. In generation by eggs laid, ovip- 
arous, the fertilized germ leaves the parent, undeveloped. The 
viviparous, or born-alive offspring, is better developed because re- 
tained longer in the mother and higher molecular arrangements 
are built up before it leaves the parent. But the line is not sharply 
defined, for some animals may have offspring by both methods. 
As a rule also parental care prolonged within reasonable limits 
marks the higher animal. In mammals, the highest vertebrates, 
viviparous humogenesis is the rule. Birds are always oviparous 
and reptiles are nearly always so. Oviparous homogenesis is the 
rule in arachnida (the spider family) except in scorpions, which 
are ovo-viviparous, that is, both methods are present ; also univer- 
sal i» Crustacea (like crabs, lobsters, etc.) except the lower kinds. 
It is universal among insects and molluscs, except low species of 
shell fish. If we start with males and females in agamogenetic 
cases we encounter occasional eggs or seeds that are neither male 
nor female, but that produce the next generation by buds. The 
relationship of growth to seed production is observable when gar- 
deners suppress the seed to form other parts of the plant and 
when the plant is allowed to ''run to seed" and becomes useless 
in other respects. 

Sex is determined in a child before birth by the internal nature 
of the ovum wherein the male or female molecular construction 
aggregates according to the kind of nutriment afforded by the 
maternal fluids. Bees directly create sex by nectar fed to a neuter 
insect so that it is a chemical matter, a difference of molecules akin 
to the difference between H? O and H-> O. The older ideas were 
that comparative vigor had much to do with the sex determination, 
as strength produced males and weakness, relatively, females. 
Darwin's man was a developed woman, while Spencer's woman 
was an arrested man, but neither view is necessary in regarding 
them as differentiated forms of an original type which, though 
never real, existed theoretically. The reason why there are usually 
about the same number of males and females was worked out by 
Diisang on mechanical principles which preserve the balance of 
sexes. If a sex is in the minority then a majority of that sex will 
next be forthcoming. If, for instance, a majority of males there 
is greater likelihood of the ova being fertilized early and that 



33 2 TIIE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

means a preponderance of female offspring, and thus the balance 
is restored. His assumption being that young, immature females 
or youthful marriages produce female children, and strength or 
maturity of parents, especially the mother, would ensure male off- 
spring as a rule. 

The influence of nutrition in generation is undeniable. Schenck 
of Vienna advanced the idea that when the mother was well fed 
upon sugar the offspring would be female, otherwise a male, but 
facts proved his incorrectness. From analysis in cell construction 
that the sperm cell is more highly differentiated than the germ cell 
the indication would be that changes in the environment were 
availed of more in the male element building of a more complex 
organism than the ovum required, which can be considered as a 
reservoir of simple molecular construction, the sperm cell being 
qualitatively the germ cell quantitatively developed. Hence when 
a war has cut off many males and male children preponderate 
thereafter to establish an equality of sexes it appears that changes 
in the environment caused by the war enabled a higher develop- 
ment of sperm cells determining the male children preponderance 
of births. So it would be the change in food and habits that would 
enable the sperm cell to develop beyond the ovum, increasing the 
likelihood of male offspring. The little there is in Schenk's idea 
is that surfeit enables the ovum to develop quantitatively, but the 
higher or lower molecular construction of the male element would 
determine the sex, independently. 

An old fashioned method of ascertaining sex pre-natally was 
by counting the fcetal pulsations. The more rapid female pulse 
indicates less difficult circulatory channels, the slower male pulse 
points to increased numbers of avenues and more complexity of 
the organs to be nourished. 

There is a wide range in the variety of ways in which procre- 
ative desire operates not only in the entire animal kingdom, but 
in a single species, nor is the human family exempt from this vari- 
ability. Havelock Ellis sums up 49 the current theories of the im- 
pulse or instinct. One of these regards it as an impulse of evacu- 
ation, the joy of relief of excretion is sometimes extreme. 50 A lady 

49 Alienist and Neurologist, Apr. 1900. 

50 Comparative Physiology and Psychology, 1883. 



HTNGBR AND LOVK. 333 

said her relief after a long delayed bladder evacuation was "like 
n." Ellis says that the analogy between reproductive de- 
sire and impulse to evacuate is striking, that the preliminaries are 
often a part of the enjoyment, nor is the glandular discharge 
necessary to the enjoyment, and the theory of evacuation is hope- 
lessly inadequate for women, owing to the trifling amount of 
mucus from the glands. Between the act and evacuation there 
are many differences, waste material is absent in one and present 
in the other ; retention is a disadvantage in one and an advantage 
in the other. The maternal nursing, however, affords gratifica- 
tion and is an excretory act. Hegar and Eulenburg's desire for 
offspring theory is absurd in this connection. Moll 51 holds to two 
separate components as uncontrollable impulses. The instinct of 
detumescence or ejaculation, like the impulse to empty the blad- 
der, the other is the impulse to touch the other, as a secondary 
character. 

The variability is partly due to first impressions occurring at 
the time of the awakening of the instinct. The memory and ner- 
vous system become by association of two or more impressions 
habituated to compound experiences. The method and surround- 
ings of a first performance may within the range of the normal or 
sometimes outside of it fasten a certain recollection indelibly in 
connection with future experiences, and this law of associated ex- 
periences is all the more potent when there is an inherited diseased 
impressionability, as in perverts or other insane. Involuntary 
ejaculations are based upon accumulations neglected or forming 
too fast as in puberty or when the vital fluids are superabundant. 
As age advances this liability ceases, as well as the possibility of a 
mental impression sufficing to create the orgasm. It is during 
the period of greatest reproductive activity that either the normal 
or abnormal peculiarities are most frequent and imperative, an 
overflow of nerve force into channels of first experience if re- 
peated many times finally adopt such channels to habitual modes, 
showing the need of early antagonizing of pervert tendencies. A 
youth nearing puberty accidentally encounters the experience 
while running or climbing and thereafter he is apt to have repe- 
titions of this under similar circumstances. At the instant of rev- 

:: Untersuchuneen iiber die Libido- Sexualis. 



334 TIIE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

elation in the young the potential channels in the peripheral 
nerves, the spinal cord and brain are profoundly shocked, in a 
never-to-be-forgotten way, and vivid recollections of the event 
itself and the associated events as well will be recalled on very 
slight provocation throughout life. The powerful nature of asso- 
ciation in all animal existence can thus account for the mutations 
of the methods of genesis and the transference of methods of 
manifestation in the evolutionary scale from two molecules at- 
tracted chemically to fish sperm and ova, and the personal inter- 
est of the fish being feebly or strongly aroused in the fusion of the 
elements and eventually the odor excitement in dogs and ocular 
attraction in bimanous animals. Exactly as there are two contend- 
ing forces in all nature, in inheritance and variation, so a fixed 
method of conjugation of a genus or species may be departed from 
by individuals and the new method may extend to a species and 
become established as normal, until it supplants what was custom- 
ary for the primitive ancestry. 

Perversions may originate in appeals to certain senses being 
so vigorous as to overwhelm the ordinary experiences of the race 
or species. Chemically a low animal or plant can be conceived as 
perverted by a molecular accident equivalent to a deformity or 
poisoning of its substance to a degree that will cause it to be at- 
tracted strangely and repelled from that to which its companions 
are attracted, and atomic inversion may be conceived in a hydro- 
gen atom preferring hydrogen to oxygen, some defect in the 
atomic construction causing this. 

In Japan the social evil is not regarded as in Europe, if neces- 
sity drives to it, the proceeds are brought to the family support 
and the act is considered praiseworthy. But in our own Virginia 
mountains the "crackers" hold meetings occasionally in which 
dogs, horses and wives are "swapped." The expression "morgan- 
atic" also signifies that hereditary rulers may be above the law, 
which is made for the common people, "left-handed marriages" 
to be set aside when selfish state considerations demand are justi- 
fied for monarchs. Occasionally a royal lover will give up every- 
thing for the sake of affection, but more often love is forsaken for 
grossly sordid reasons by those near the throne or who sit upon it. 

Rome and Greece, and later France under Louis XIV and XV, 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 335 

afford instances i)\ the decadence of people giving way to luxury 
and sensuality, and the genesic erethism of old, broken down inon- 
archs present revolting lessons that should teach self-control and 
contentment with humbler stations in life. The Pall Mall Gazette 
at one time gave startling revelations of the excesses among 
wealthy roues. Debauchees appear among the two extremes of 
the very rich and the very poor. The abandoned, wretched poor 
of Xaples, uncared for, uninstructed, are left to their animal na- 
tures, and even the churches forsake them. Absence of desire 
(anaesthesia sexualis) may be present throughout life, usually in 
instances of sluggish vitality, and it may also occur after excesses 
or through great revulsion of feeling and in the course of advanc- 
ing age. An increase, however (hyperesthesia sexualis) may 
also occur in consumption and in a senile reawakening, as in the 
approach of senile dementia leading to unfortunate complications, 
as of aged men mistreating young children, and in others there 
may be paederasty or even bestiality. 

Erotism even in the insane, may be seemingly independent of 
the basic faculty, for an adored one may be idolized without refer- 
ence to the grosser passion, and, indeed, there may be repugnance 
to this while the ardor otherwise is unmistakable. The exagger- 
ated inclination is known as satyriasis in men and nymphomania 
in women, and these are commonly observed in mania as one of 
the consequences of the stimulated general functions of the body, 
the senses, emotions, intellect and bodily functions being exalted 
in activity. 

Animals have been known to suffer perversions, as among the 
insects known as the coleoptera, which are considered normally 
perverted or inverted. There is an instance of a donkey becoming 
exclusively attached to a cow. The desires for food and repro- 
ductive indulgence are the two main perversions. Insane women 
may indulge in obscene language and accusations against others 
to suggest their own exaggerated desires, and the dreams, delu- 
sions and hallucinations of the insane are often filled with ideas of 
grotesque natures called demonomania by the ancients ; in some of 
these perturbed mental states the patients declared that incubi or 
succubi according to the sex of the demon, would visit them 



336 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

nightly with their annoying attentions. Krafft-Ebing 52 defines 
sexual perversion as a paresthesia sexualis or inclination to per- 
sons of the opposite sex with perverse activity of the instinct. And 
precisely because this perverseness of activity is the cause of the 
discovery of the trouble, so perversion may, in my opinion, be 
greatly more prevalent in minor degrees than writers on the sub- 
ject have been able to determine, for the perverse activity may be 
absent in these minor cases. The exaggerated influence that the 
axillary effluvia may have in some instances shows the reversion- 
ary olfactory impressionability. 

Sadism is the name given to the perversion in which there is 
an association of active cruelty. Krafft-Ebing enumerates these 
as pervert murderers, mutilators of corpses, those who injure 
women by stabbing or whipping and those who defile or degrade 
them or make other attacks upon women (symbolic sadism), as 
where one took pleasure solely in cutting a girl's bang, or another 
in combing a woman's hair ; another would shave a girl's face 
with lather and a razor; another took pleasure in seeing a 
woman's face wrapped up as though for toothache; some lick 
boots of the women and one kisses the great toe, while others are 
inclined to public osculum ad nates. Another division of sadism 
is in the delight of seeing boys whipped. There is sadism with 
animals, a gross instance being in the Chinese treatment of geese. 
Sadism in women is not frequent, but when it does exist it may 
be considered as a masculine primitive trait reverted to, and so 
constitutes not only perversion but a primitive inversion, if the 
extreme cruelty can be regarded as somewhat exclusively mascu- 
line. Spitzka 53 mentions the cannabalistic or analogous pervert- 
ness confused with sexual desire. ''Several of the Caesars, 
a familv which presented numerous examples of transmitted men- 
tal disorder, delighted in seeing maidens slaughtered from sexual 
motives." He also refers to instances cited by Lombroso, and 
the scene of revolting murders in Westphalia of young girls who 
had been violated. 

Spitzka further observes : "It is to be insisted here that even 
these terrible aberrations may exist as combined results of a 

52 Psychopathia Sexualis. 
~' ; Insanity, p. 42. 



Ill N'GER AND LOVE. 



337 



vicious inclination and cynical brutality in persons not insane." 
The term anthropophagy, as indicating a morbid perversion of 
the appetite, calling for the satisfaction of murderous and canni- 
balistic desires, should be limited to those cases where there are 
signs of heredity, somatic evidences of degeneration, and other 
manifestations of a faulty nervous system. In one such case Es- 
quirol found in the executed monster, Leger, gross brain dis- 
ease of the kind sometimes discovered in the insane. Necrophil- 
ism is a name given to the propensity to violate dead bodies, 
which rarely recurs in periodical insanity. Gamier 54 regards 
emotionalism as a true stigma of degeneracy, and holds that 
cruelty and ferocity may be but a brutal yielding to voluptuous 
frenzy. The sadist connects suffering with the sensation and can 
only enjoy by being cruel. Sadists are of every grade, from those 
who perform silly acts of minor cruelty to monstrous crimes, like 
those of the Whitechapel murders, assassination, mutilation, an- 
thropophagy and necrophilism. 

Masochism is the association of passively endured cruelty and 
violence. The desire is directed to subjugation and abuse by the 
opposite sex and, with modifications, occurring as a pathological 
state in a few men and as a physiological normal state most often 
in women, though not recorded as masochism, points to its deri- 
vation from far-off savage times when primitive brutal men-apes 
ferociously attacked women, with defective differentiation be- 
tween the food and procreative appetites, so that these early men 
were naturally sadists, and early women were masochists, and 
associated the pleasure and suffering of eating and being eaten 
and of reproductive ferocity and capture. This desire for abuse 
and humiliation as a means of sexual satisfaction is observed in 
the felidse, the lions are like the cats in their bitings and embrace, 
the female cat apparently suffers from the male ferocity but alter- 
nately fears and seeks the. experience. 

One masochist required defection in his face at the critical 
instant ; another suffered oral urination ; one carried a strap to be 
flogged with and a divorce was secured by a woman with a family 
of children when she discovered her husband's morbid impulse 
caused him to drink large quantities of excreted renal fluids. 

:a Alienist and Neurologist, October, 1900. 



338 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Lord Cornberry, a cousin of Queen Anne, appointed governor 
of New York, was a degraded hypocrite, devoid of moral sense, 
who dressed himself as a woman and paraded the streets with 
libidinous gestures. It is of medico-legal importance that while 
perversions may be accompanied by bloodthirsty exhibitions, in- 
versions are especially dangerous in this regard, the jealousy of 
inverted affection mounts to destruction of its victims before it 
can be satisfied. According to Bancroft, 55 homosexual practices 
occurred among American Indians. Sodomy prevailed among 
the Aztecs and Mayas, and inverts were occasional among the 
Tupi Brazilian tribe, women dressing like men and acting like 
them, and sometimes a man would forsake the company of his 
own sex to do women's work only. An actress in the United 
States was noted for her mannish behavior and likings ; she 
dressed as nearly like a man as she could, in hat, vest and coat, 
and her example has been followed largely by men-women gen- 
erally. The basis of this sort of inappropriate dress is inversion, 
or the partial inversion of hermaphorditism. Alice Mitchell killed 
Freda in Memphis, Tennessee, by cutting her throat and on the 
witness stand Alice wept for her lost love. She was sent to an 
asylum as insane. Another instance similar to this occurred in 
the murder of a female attendant at the Elgin, Illinois, asylum 
by an invert woman who loved the attendant. A prominent Chi- 
cago surgeon was an invert whose grosser exhibitions were made 
when intoxicated. Some of these inverts write ardent love letters 
speaking of themselves as feminine. The ancient Lesbian love 
was of this nature. Homosexuality is defined by Krafft-Ebing as 
a great diminution or absence of feeling for the opposite, and a 
substitution of desire for the same sex, a contrary sexual instinct. 
He considers that it may be acquired and be a simple reversal of 
desire, or a complete change of character, and he becomes a 
female in feeling, or a woman may become a male in feeling. 
This inversion may also be congenital where there is either homo- 
sexuality only or heterosexuality with predominating homosex- 
uality (a psychical hermaphrodism) ; another division would be 
effeminacy (as among the so-called Miss Nancys), and still an- 
other sort have body differences from those of their own sex ap- 

55 Native Races of the Pacific Coast, Vol. II, pp. 467, 774. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 339 

preaching without being complete reversals of sexual features. 
These homosexual individuals were known as timings and the 
man-woman, woman-man, anatomically or physiologically, were 
classed under androgyny and gynandry. The great danger in 
these inversions is their liability at any time to become imperative 
and murderous. The fault lies in an embryological error. Homo- 
sexuality may commingle all the other perversions with eroto- 
mania. Apprehension of punishment never restrains perverts. 

Fetichism, in this study, is a special term to designate the as- 
sociation of desire with certain portions of dress or of the person. 
Binet concludes that in the life of every fetichist there may be 
assumed to have been some event which determined the associa- 
tion w r ith the single impression, such as could occur during early 
youth and the first awakening of the vita sexualis. Among male 
fetichists there are those who adore a part of the body, as a hand 
or foot, and inclinations are aroused by seeing such parts, and 
there are hair fetichists who are aroused by seeing or feeling this 
part, liking to comb it or stroke it, and another sort are unduly 
excited by articles of attire, especially underclothing, or handker- 
chiefs ; but a common perversion of this sort is among the shoe- 
stealers. These imperative impulses compel them to steal 
women's shoes, sometimes snatching them from their feet. This 
paresthesia of the instinct depends upon some determinant to 
arouse the complete feeling. In one case a pair of red shoes had 
to be worn by the woman and in another black stockings, as in 
both of these the earliest impressions were associated with articles 
of that sort. It is an attempt to recall a strong impression aroused 
at the time of first excitation and is psychologically an association 
memory. There may be indifference to ordinary means of excit- 
ing the function and a detail takes the place of the whole. Fetich- 
ism may substitute parts of the person, either uncovered or cov- 
ered. It is an obsession, and is divided into corporeal or imper- 
sonal, giving to parts or objects the exclusive power of producing 
the orgasm, the fetich being directly or by mental representation 
the element at once necessary and sufficient for excitation. The 
sadi-fetichistic hair-clipper experiences the orgasm when he acts 
violently, and by consequence mutilates the object of his fetich- 
ism. One case in Chicago committed suicide and his brain was 



340 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

said to have been injured when he was young. Flaggelants or 
whippers may be sadi-fetichists. There are those who stick pins 
or needles into the glutei and cut the ears of victims. Vampirism 
and necrophilism are the worst. Sadi-fetichists may be corporeal 
or impersonal. As in ordinary fetichism the desire beholds an 
object which can alone awaken the orgasm, but only on the condi- 
tion that the fetich be subjected to violence and be torn, broken, 
soiled, burnt or otherwise destroyed. 

Oralists are extremely common and may be regarded as fetich- 
ists in a certain sense, but all these perversions shade off into each 
other, as can be imagined when the central idea in all is the one 
event. The fetichist who finds gratification in gently combing 
woman's hair and the other who loves to cut girls' bangs is sim- 
ply a mild sort of sadist, and the worst sadist is a violent fetichist. 

Dr. A. R. Reynolds reported a case of sexual perversion of a 
peculiar kind, 56 in which a man who had married a one-legged 
woman became after her death perverted with regard to that con- 
dition. He sought out one-legged women and spent considerable 
money upon them in securing artificial limbs for them and by 
handling the stump of the leg he derived his only gratification. 
Right leg amputations were the ones he preferred. This could 
be called personal or corporeal fetichism with a tinge of sadism, 
and association at an early period of the vita sexualis of the act 
with the personal peculiarities was the cause of this perversion. 

Exhibitionists are a strange group of perverts who may or 
may not be insane in the ordinary use of the term. Lasegue found 
that the exhibitionists comprise dements, epileptics, paretic de- 
ments, idiots, alcoholics and impulsive or obsessed types as well. 
Sometimes the exhibition is unconscious, but often it is an equiva- 
lent to the act or its approach with all the agonizing struggles 
against it of the impulsive obsession. These perverts may be 
frigid but compelled to exhibit themselves at intervals with parox- 
ysms and remissions. They are mentally twisted. Impulsive ex- 
hibitionism is a pervert obsession and impulse, characterized by 
an irresistible tendency to exhibit, in public generally, with a fixity 
of hour and place ; there may be flaccidity, without appearance of 

56 Meeting Chicago Medical Society, Nov. 1888, reported in Western 
Medical Reporter Supplement. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 341 

lascivionsness, the accomplishment of the exhibition ending the 
agonizing struggle. 

The doctrine of evolution offers its solutions not only for mor- 
phological and physiological problems but also explanations of 
psychological phenomena. 

It is evident that if species are mutable, if forms change one 
into the other, then the peculiarities of the more remote or earlier 
forms may be inherited by the latter, and that pathological mental 
states are often reversions to the characteristics of progenitors. 
For this reason we find in the majority of insane, that the emo- 
tions, brutal ferocity and sexual peculiarities of lower animals 
exhibit themselves, because the later acquired intellectual traits, 
which held grosser mentality in check, are, during the insanity 
suppressed. Tracing all animal life back to primitive forms such 
as the monads and amoebae, modern biological science studies the 
life history of these low organisms and reduces physiological pro- 
cesses to their simplest expression. 

In Science (N. Y.), June I, 1881, I published the following, 
and later included it in my "Comparative Physiology and Psy- 
chology," published by A. C. McClurg & Co. The London Jour- 
nal of Mental Science mentioned it as a "well reasoned out the- 
ory," and commended it to all students of mental disease. * 

A paper on "Researches into the Life History of the Monads," 
by W. H. Dallinger, F.R.M.S., and J. Drysdale, M.D., was read 
before the Royal Microscopical Society, December 3, 1873, where- 
in fusion of the monad was described as being preceded by the 
absorption of one form by another. One monad would fix on 
the sarcode of another and the substance of the lesser or under 
one would pass into that of the upper one. 

In about two hours the merest trace of the lower one was 
left, and in four hours fusion and multiplication of the larger 
monad began. A full description of this interesting phenomenon 
may be found in the Monthly Microscopical Journal (London), 
for October, 1877. 

Prof. Leidy has asserted that the amoeba is a cannibal, where- 
upon Mr. Michels, in the American Journal of Microscopy, July, 
1877, calls attention to Dallinger and Drysdale's contributions, 
and draws therefrom the inference that each cannibalistic act of 



342 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

the amoebae is a reproductive, or copulative one, if the term is ad- 
missible. 

The editor (Dr. Henry Lawson) of the English Journal, 
agrees with Michels. 

Among the numerous speculations upon the origin of the 
sexual appetite, such as Maudsley's altruistic conclusion, which 
always seemed to me to be far-fetched, I have encountered none 
that has referred its derivation to hunger. 

At the first glance such a suggestion seems ludicrous enough, 
but a little consideration will show that in thus fusing two desires 
we have still to get at the meaning and derivation of the primary 
one — desire for food. 

The cannibalistic amoeba may, as Dallinger's monad certainly 
does, impregnate itself by eating one of its own kind, and we 
have innumerable instances among algae and protozoa of this sex- 
ual fusion appearing very much like ingestion. Crabs have been 
seen to confuse the two desires, by actually eating portions of 
each other while copulating, and in a recent number of the Scien- 
tific American, a Texan details the mantis religiosa female eating 
oir the head of the male mantis during conjugation. 

Some of the female arachnida find it necessary to finish a 
marital repast by devouring the male, who tries to scamper away 
from his fate. The bitings and even the embrace of the higher 
animals appear to have reference to the derivation. It is a phy- 
siological fact that association often transfers an instinct in an 
apparently outrageous manner. With quadrupeds it is clearly 
olfaction that is most related to sexual desire and its reflexes, but 
not so in man. Ferrier diligently searches the region of the tem- 
poral lobe near its connection with the olfactory nerve for the 
seat of sexuality, but with the diminished importance of the smell- 
ing sense in man, the faculty of sight has grown, to vicariate 
olfaction. Certainly the "lust of the eye" is greater than that of 
the other special sense organs among bimana. 

In all animal life multiplication proceeds from growth, and 
until a certain growth, puberty, is reached, reproduction does not 
occur. The complementary nature of growth and reproduction 
is observable in the large size attained by some animals after cas- 



Ill NGER AND LOVE. 343 

tration. Could we stop the division of an amoeba a comparable 
increase in size would be effected. 

The grotesqueness of these views is due to their novelty, not 
their being unjustifiable. 

While it must thus seem apparent that a primeval origin for 
both ingestive and sexual desire exists, and that each is a true 
hunger, the one being repressible and in higher animal life being 
subjected to more control than the other, the question then pre- 
sents itself: What is hunger? It requires but little reflection to 
convince us of its potency in determining the destiny of nations 
and individuals and what a stimulus it is in animated creation. It 
seems likely that it has its origin in the atomic affinities of inani- 
mate nature, a view monistic enough to please Haeckel and Tyn- 
dall. Dr. Spitzka, in commenting on the foregoing in the same 
journal, June 25, 1881, says: 

"There are some observations made by alienists which strongly 
tend to confirm Dr. Clevenger's theory. It is well known that 
under pathological circumstances relations obliterated in a higher 
development and absent in health, return and simulate condi- 
tions formed in lower, and even in primitive forms. 

An instance of this is the pica or morbid appetite of pregnant 
women and hysterical girls for chalk, slate pencils and other arti- 
cles of an earthy nature. To some extent this has been claimed 
to constitute a sort of reversion to the oviparous ancestry, which, 
like the birds of our day, seek calcareous material required for the 
shell structure in their food. There are forms of mental perver- 
sion properly classed under the head of the degenerative mental 
states, with which a close relation between the hunger appetite 
and sexual appetite becomes manifest. 

"Under the heading 'Wollust, Mordlust, Anthropophagie,' 
Krafft-Ebing describes a form of sexual perversion where the 
sufferer fails to find gratification unless he or she can bite, eat, 
murder or mutilate the mate. He refers to the old Hindoo myth 
Civa and Durga as showing that such observation in the sexual 
sphere were not unknown to the ancient races. He gives an in- 
stance where, after the act, the ravisher butchered his victim and 
would have eaten a piece of the viscera ; another where the crim- 



344 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

inal drank the blood and ate the heart ; still another, where certain 
parts of the body were cooked and eaten. 57 

The London scientific weekly, Nature, in reprinting my arti- 
cle, quotes Ovid : "Mulieres in coitu nonnunquam genas cir- 
vicemquse maris mordunt." 

Eighteen years later Roux adopted my hunger theory and 
spoke of sexual hunger affecting the whole system. 58 

Bloodthirsty and other abnormal hunger developments could 
be expected to appear in defectives when the sexual feelings were 
excited. The Madchen-Schander of Leipzig and others had ejac- 
ulations upon wounding women with lancets. The original "blue 
beard," Gilles de Retz, in the eighteenth century, murdered female 
children in a wholesale manner and in the midst of blood result- 
ing from his mutilation he had intercourse with his victims. He 
charged his crimes on the perusal of Suetonius' work, "The 
Twelve Csesars." Many criminal assaults of negroes in the south- 
ern states of America are of a comparable nature. 

As for the origin of these manifold perversions no single ex- 
planation such as reversion or atavism will suffice, in all cases, for 
in simple fetichism, personal or impersonal, the memory is for all 
subsequent time impressed with a group of associated experiences 
at the critical and exceedingly impressionable instant of the tre- 
mendous physiological excitement of a new and unexpected sen- 
sation. Association is much more potent in memorizing generally 
than is supposed, and in some the power to disassociate is not so 
well developed. Persistence in yielding to the repetition of the 
original impression would tend to fix and intensify it, while oppo- 
sition to it would help to break it up. This associative origi- 
nation is quite apparent in the case cited by Reynolds of the in- 
fatuation for women with one leg, and can be observed in many 
similar cases. Many normal persons, however, value any object 
that recalls the loved person and this may be regarded as a healthy 
process of association, the abnormal consists in concentration upon 
one object or incident. If sodomy is reversionary it is to cloacal 
apposition of reptiles, but it may be regarded as a substitution 

"Ueber genisse Anomalien des Geschlechtstriebes van Krafft-Ebing, 

Archiv. fur Psychiatrie, VII. 
5S Psychologie de l'instinct sexuel, 1899, pp. 22, 33. 



HUNGER AND LOVE. 345 

and not a reversion, for heterosexual ity is not always interfered 
with by Ihe depravity, though sometimes this is the case, espe- 
cially in inverts. Inversion is plainly mental hermaphrodism, and 
it is instructive that function thus may defy the presence of or- 
gans for a complementary function. 

Sadism is clearly atavistic to brutally savage ancestry, prob- 
ably remoter than the ape-like man stage. The cat family exhibit 
much of this ferocity and the female cat is masochistic. Then 
sadism would pertain to reversion to brutal male states and maso- 
chism to submissive female states, such as slaves even in modern 
times have been compelled to experience in all its degrees, and if 
there is anything that would afford opportunity for the develop- 
ing of sadism it would be when slavery was sanctioned and re- 
gaided as divinely ordained. One of the most instructive condi- 
tions, to my way of thinking, is that of exhibitionism. It appears 
to me to plainly unravel what would be a tangled snarl in finding 
the thread of evolution of the sexual processes. The act of 
spawning in the presence of the male fish and the act of fecundat- 
ing with sperm by the male in the presence of the female fish are 
almost identical processes to exhibitionism, not analogous but 
homologous, and just as the human foetus may have gills and the 
cardinal system of blood vessels of a fish, so may the adult retain 
fish exhibitionist propensities of sexual manifestations as a fail- 
ure of development, as a teratological characteristic, preciselv as 
branchial fistulae, or openings in the neck of an adult, point to the 
failure of the fish gills to be retrograded normally, and as ichthy- 
osis, or the scaly epidermis, occasionally develops on the back of 
a human being. 

We are now prepared, I think, to trace the development of the 
sense in both sexes from its origin not only up to and through 
the simian phylum but throughout every ramification of animal 
life. Starting from the fusion of two cells which pass into the 
resting stage and then undergo segmentation and multiplication of 
the original cells we have the initial fusion very much like inges- 
tion. This could be considered as the hunger stage of the func- 
tion which later develops or differentiates into the sexual stage 
by special organs differentiated from the intestinal tract, and the 
hunger may reside in these organs alone and not influence the 



346 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

owners of the organs in some lines of creation. The lamprey 
eel propagates by contact, but that is no reason why the eel-like 
progenitor of both the lamprey and the fishes should be regarded 
as doing the same thing, we see that the ova and sperm elements 
unite without contact of the fishes by a process of exhibitionism, 
so that this is a stage in the development of man to which some 
imperfect persons revert. Finally the fetichistic association 
occurs with the development of the nervous system and special 
senses such as tactile, olfactory and sight, until simultaneous ex- 
citation of these senses became an accompaniment of the perform- 
ance. The exhibitionist fish may to some extent be fetichistic 
with regard to the spawn ocularly, and so we have fetichism re- 
versionary and connected with exhibitionism by easy stages. The 
behavior of eels in conjugation suggests sadism and female 
spiders are undoubtedly sadists. 

It is not necessary to include sodomy as atavistic or as a step 
in evolution, for with the natural selection of an intromittent 
organ which can bring the sperm elements closer to the ova which 
are less active and the accessory apparatus growing from the 
greater activity of the semen as compared to the relatively qui- 
escent ova, the apposition of any and all these special organs is 
directly traceable to cloacal anal junction. Sadism is allied to the 
cannibalistic behavior of many low animals, crocodiles and sal- 
mon among such as eat their young, and sadism during or after 
conjugation is doubtless far more common than is recorded. 
Masochism is the complement and accompaniment of sadism 
when it is voluntary, and extends with sadism from early brute 
days to human slavery and bandit times, the slayer being more 
common than the one who desires to be mutilated, and if this 
sadism occurs in a female and masochism in a male then there are 
inversions in addition to the perversions. A faulty development 
which transmits the instincts of one sex with the organs of an- 
other need not be regarded as going back as far as to the ex- 
tremely remote bisexual ancestry ; it can be allied to dextrocardia 
as teratological. Among so many complete males and females it 
is no wonder that here and there androgyny and gynandry occur 
and sometimes a masculine and feminine intellect is misplaced. 



HUNGER AM) LOVE. 347 

\ bookseller named Bedborough, May 31, 1898, was brought before 
Sir John Bridge, at the Bow Street Police Court, for selling a scientific 
work on sexual inversion, written by a famous criminologist, Havelock 
Ellis. Notwithstanding the clear evidence that the book was not written 
to pander to prurience but to add to our knowledge of an important an- 
thropological subject. Sir John immortalized himself as mistaken and as 
not being influenced by honi soit qui mal y pense, and condemned the 
book as tending to corrupt the morals of her majesty's subjects. The 
foremost scientists interested in mental disease in America, England and 
Europe uniformly express indignation at this cant and playing to the gal- 
leries, or as Shakespeare would put it, "splitting the ears of the ground- 
lings." With this precedent and notwithstanding the fact that German 
works such as Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and some French 
writings use much plainer language, I felt impelled to resort to technical 
terms in discussing this delicate subject so that the work may not exceed 
the limits of liberty to express opinion which we regarded as better in 
England and America than elsewhere. The time may come when any- 
thing ordinarily spoken of as made by God may not be considered too 
vile to mention. Prudishness is usually hypocritical and intended to cover 
a vulgar nature. Nature cannot be understood if part of it is hidden from 
sight. I have endeavored to avoid unnecessary plainness in dealing with 
the important subject. 



CHAPTER X. 

ACQUISITIVENESS. 

"Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the water? 
Why, as men do a-land : the great ones eat up the little ones." 

Pericles, Act II., Scene I. 

The many ways in which the desire to grab may make itself ap- 
parent point to its universality and show that it is deeply rooted 
in nature. The way of the world is to get things, whether by fair 
means or foul, regardless of the end or means being good or bad. 
Tribes grab territory, kings grab thrones, the people either snatch 
from one another or adjust to a condition of give and take, evolved 
from the primitive grab method. Priests clutch the tangible 
money of the multitudes and promise to pay in intangible immor- 
tality. Inorganic chemical substances are grabbed by the plant 
to promote its growth and the animal eats the plant and in turn 
is eaten. In short, the history of the universe and of all life con- 
sists in endless differentiations of the game of grab. Atoms grab 
to> form molecules, the latter grasp one another and new affinities 
begin. Cells are formed from molecules and these form plants 
and animals. The differentiation is in the relinquishment of the 
lower grabs for a developed idea of what is more desirable, and 
these ideas are not the same with all, for one prefers cash, another 
science, another, like the Indian, cares for food, or another may 
be "other-worldly" in his desires. 

Every cell is absolutely selfish and never passes on to another 
cell what it can take itself. As Schopenhauer says, "And yet 
when all is told man has been struggling for the very same things 
as the brute has attained." You cannot repress the grab instinct 
in human nature, nor can you disguise it in tyrants who seek per- 
petual power to grab, and plan to destroy all who oppose them. 
The lives of plants and animals reveal that selfishness is a neces- 
sary law of nature, and that there are grades of selfishness. It 

348 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 349 

seems a hard thing to admit, but facts should be looked at 
squarely. A pack of hungry wolves eat their own wounded. 

Animals arc provided with prehensile organs developed up- 
ward from where the entire substance envelops the food toward 
such structures as hands, feet, ribs, lungs, stomach, etc., to enable 
better grasp of food or air or to enable movement over the earth's 
surface in search of food. 

The grasping desire is never differentiated out of existence for 
the reason that as atoms group to form molecules their new affini- 
ties may differ from the former or older affinities, that is, the 
atoms newly grouped may desire new things, and as molecules 
pass upward in complexity of grouping from the inorganic to the 
highest organic series, and including all animals as but complexly 
arranged molecules, the desires of these animals may differ or im- 
prove as they ascend the scale of development, but man is never 
satisfied because no molecule is satisfied if it is possible to enter 
into new combinations with other molecules. So insatiability is 
inborn and unavoidable. Sharks' eggs have grasping appendages 
like the tendrils of some climbing plants so radically and early is 
the grab propensity developed, and this primitive grabbing de- 
sire may survive and be strengthened with but little change from 
its original state, so that analogically the remorseless money grab- 
ber may sociologically be a cancer, for cancerous tissue may over- 
develop some structures, without regard to associated parts, which 
it may strangle, and ulcerate, and it may with indifference cause 
intense suffering. 

When a man falls helpless, as when drunk, sick or wounded, 
his pockets are liable to be picked. Wild animals fight over their 
food ; men do so in less recognized ways. The starling bullies the 
thrushes out of what they find to eat and fishes snatch food from 
each other when they can. The grabbing instinct of most animals 
has sole regard to appetite, but with the monkey tribe there is 
often the added mischievous disposition. In the thefts of the 
Amazon sapajou there is more wasted than stolen. The capuchins 
are very mischievous and covetous and are great hypocrites in 
pretending perfect innocence when making efforts to steal food. 
The ffannets are like lawyers in their fightinc: each other in the 



35° THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

air for food, stealing fish from one another and afterwards roost- 
ing together the best of friends. 

The macaque of Barbary robs gardens. The wolverine will 
steal and conceal things of no use to it, such as guns, axes, blan- 
kets, etc., and is very cunning in avoiding traps. 

Some birds, like the magpie and raven, are attracted to glitter- 
ing or bright objects like silver or jewels, and resemble in this 
respect the rubbish-gathering dements of insane asylums. The 
regent and bower birds have an ornamenting, decorating propen- 
sity, and love to display their colored and shiny trophies about 
their premises, but the miserly raven and magpie hide their steal- 
ings. 

The snarling and growling of beasts of prey are to dismay 
others who might grab their food. Sometimes we hear a cat or 
dog indulge in this ancient method of self-protection, but domestic 
animals generally have largely outgrown the savagery of their 
wild progenitors. 

A developed species of grabbing occurs in cuckoos, some of 
which are parasitic, though others build their own nests. Some 
victimize small birds and some throw or drive the rightful owners 
from nests which they then appropriate. Some deposit their 
cuckoo eggs in the stolen nest and break the eggs of other birds to 
make room for their own eggs, while other cuckoos after being 
hatched live in peace with the offspring of the host. When the 
common cuckoo is mobbed by other birds it is owing to its resem- 
blance to the hawk and not through recognition of its evicting 
nature. The male cuckoos are more numerous and so they are 
polyandrous and the female does all the courting and there are 
often fierce quarrels and fights. The female calls to the male and 
it is instantly answered. They select the bird's nest in which are 
eggs more nearly resembling their own, though there is variability 
in the coloring. Crested cuckoos select the nests of crows and 
magpies with eggs resembling their own, nor do they eject the 
rightful owners. The Indian pied crested cuckoo lays blue eggs 
resembling in color those of the babbling thrushes in whose nest 
it places them. Apparently the young cuckoo ejects the rightful 
owners when the young are hatched, as the babblers are often seen 
in attendance upon their parasitic dependents without any of their 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 351 

own young being of the party ; sometimes the cuckoo puts two of 
its eggs into a babbler's nest, and it is said to break some of the 
foster parents' eggs to make room for its own. Colonel Butler 
says that when they discover a nest of a babbler which does not 
suit them to lay in the cuckoos invariably destroy the eggs al- 
ready there by driving a hole into them with their bills and suck- 
ing the contents. In the Himalayas the hawk cuckoo is parasitic 
on the babbling thrushes. 

The variable color of the cuckoo eggs are according to the bird 
imposed upon, and colors are hereditary. The 1 golden cuckoo de- 
vours eggs of the cape sparrow to make room for its own. The 
American cuckoo is a great plunderer of eggs of small birds and 
is said to even devour the helpless offspring. The young koel is 
black to suit the plumage of the yellow- wattled myna. for they 
might not be fed were they brown like their mother. But other 
birds care for their parasites without regard to much resemblance, 
so this supposition may not be necessary. The Savannah cuckoos 
pick ticks from cattle, being devourers of parasites and rendering 
mutual service to the host, but the service is not from generous 
motives. 

This cuckoo propensity is frequent among some human beings 
of the parasitic class and is always associated with a low degree 
of intelligence as a rule. At least the disposition to wreck others 
for the sake of gain was more common in a crude stage of the 
ape-like man's career if it does not belong to an even lower stage. 
Certainly impudence and cruel selfishness are essentials to a 
human cuckoo nature. 

This ingrained natural acquisitiveness comes to the front when 
the mind is deeply impaired, in terminal dementia, the mental 
graveyard to which all chronic insanities tend. Terminal dements 
pick up and secrete rubbish of all kinds such as pieces of worth- 
less broken glass, rags, buttons, pebbles, bright objects, old bones, 
etc., and the females are worst in this repect. An old negro at 
the county asylum would gather as much as fifty pounds a week 
and carry it around in his pockets and shirt bosom, until periodi- 
cally disgorged by someone. There is a low estimate of values in 
such cases, a childish preference for glitter. Such things as rep- 
resent value, like money, would not be regarded except as addi- 



35 3 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

tional rubbish. Klepotmania depends upon defective mental con- 
trol, reverting to the animal inclination to steal. 

Novelists like Wilkie Collins cater to the popular comprehen- 
sion in such novels as "No Name," based upon social grabbings, 
yearnings and scheming for money, all about as interesting to 
the philosopher as the capers and bickerings of cats and dogs, and 
about as sensible. Robert Ingersoll said, "There would be an 
air bottling company, limited, if it were possible." 

Involuntarily yet instantly, and though subsequently ashamed 
of it, when calamity befalls others the selfish heart asks itself 
"How can I profit by this ?" Hearing of another's good fortune 
the thought occurs, "What a lot I could do with that amount of 
money !" Misfortunes we do not care to hear about, especially 
if likely to entail inconvenience upon ourselves, but good news 
may be enjoyed as possible participants ourselves. 

The world loves people to be good-natured because it expects 
to' take advantage of them. A clerk who was advised to sing at his 
work said he did not dare to do so for all the other clerks would 
try to borrow money of him. 

Society is divisible into workers, beggars and thieves, whether 
the society is high or low. "One must live" is the excuse of the 
smugglers in "Monte Cristo." Hoarding and squandering are 
animal traits and insanity may bring either to the front. The 
lesser form of insanity, mania, may exhibit wild extravagance, 
alcoholic insanity also, but the graver disease, paretic dementia, is 
similarly inclined to spendthrift habits. In the squandering there 
is disregard of the future as to hunger, or other privations. The 
Australian savage is improvident, and so are many animals and 
civilized people. Thrift is a developed mental state of the more 
provident sort and is independent of extreme selfishness or gen- 
erosity, high or low intellect and station in life. 

John Fiske 1 remarks the difference between the desire to accu- 
mulate on the part of the civilized and the improvidence of the 
savage arising from his inability to realize the consequences of 
shiftlessness, so the careless man in money matters is a barbarian 
to that extent. The happy-go-lucky person may be honest in hop- 
Excursions of an Evolutionist, p. 218. 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 353 

mg to be able to pay, or dishonest in not intending to do so. In 
either case he is not the evolved type of person who tries to see 
ahead and incur no obligations avoidable. Much imprudence and 
crime is due to slothful expectation that things will come right 
some way. The power to form distinct mental pictures of future 
matters imparts self-control. 

.The natural snatch and hold-on instinct is evident in young 
children, who have to be trained, especially in table manners, and 
to be less selfish. Children raised without other children to share 
with are noticeably more selfish than others who have been com- 
pelled to have regard for their brothers or sisters. And in this 
we also see how sympathy grows by familiarity. Showmen say 
that it is a dangerous thing to attempt the distribution of circus 
tickets or souvenir advertising matters to a crowd of school chil- 
dren, as in their eager selfishness they trample on each other as 
the Russian peasants did at the distribution of souvenirs when the 
Czar Nicholas was crowned. 

One may have the grab instinct strongly developed in one direc- 
tion and not in others, and the family or public, one or the other, 
may see the worst side of the grabber according as his sympathies 
or fears determine. 

in street cars a man may exhibit selfish disregard of others in 
keeping two seats while others have none. Hotels and steam- 
boats throw away food that would keep thousands of poor in pro- 
visions. 

Tom Hood speaks of gold, as 

"Spurned by the young, and hugged by the old 
Even to the verge of the church-yard mold." 

The inexperience of youth leads to recklessness and the recol- 
lections of the aged to miserliness. They learn that "there is no 
such friend as a dollar or two," and knowing that the young often 
cast ofl: the aged, heartlessly, the saving disposition indicates 
thoughtfulness and experience, either acquired or inherited. The 
anxiety of the senile dement centers in his property, but he has 
lost the mental ability to properly protect it. Squandering and 
saving are not exclusively human. In some ways man is often 
more reckless or more rapacious than other animals. 



354 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

If some other intelligence were to study man as we study an 
anthill, he would take him in the aggregate. He would say : 
This species, spread over almost all the world, numbers about 
fourteen hundred million, a number less than the infusoria in a 
cupful of stagnant pond water. Of these about two hundred and 
fifty million are without a shred of clothing, and seven hundred 
million are clothed only in their loins. The nude hold a majority 
over the clad. I believe this bipedal mammal calls himself homo 
sapiens, but taking him in the aggregate the better name would 
be homo sylvestris, for only the more favored have got out of the 
woods. The creature seems to toil, but he remains poor. He is 
improvident. He does not ''take thought enough of to-morrow." 
Nearly three hundred millions of the human race build no homes 
and have no shelter except what nature affords in clefts and 
caves. 2 

When a graveyard is filled and those buried therein are for- 
gotten the land is sold for building lots and the tombstones find 
their way to soda water factories or lime-kilns. 

Dead or living are thrown out of their homes by legal or ille- 
gal processes as remorsely as the cuckoo destroys the eggs of his 
foster mother or the gambler pockets the wages of the dupe be- 
cause some other would have done it, or the dupe would have 
swindled the gambler if he could. 

Lady Burdett-Coutts offered to build water reservoirs and 
works for Palestine, and the Sultan of Turkey stipulated that he 
should have charge of the money and construction, but as the or- 
dinary politician who* controls the building of the Philadelphia 
City Hall is satisfied with one-half the appropriation the divine 
porte would be satisfied only with all of it, so the Jews remain 
without proper drinking water. It appears to depend upon cir- 
cumstances whether the plunderer is honored or not. A Czar, 
a Napoleon or a king will have his praises sung for centuries for 
doing what a Cecil Rhodes, Clive or Warren Hastings were con- 
demned for doing. The nation, however, accepted the spoils, but 
tabooed the spoilers because they were not royal. History abounds 
in tales of usurpation, and imposition such as the salt tax and the 

2 W. D. Gunning, "Open Court," September, 1887. 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 355 

ruthless grabbing by the powerful whenever a grab is possible, 
but it is not always conceded that the oppressed would turn op- 
pressor if he could. It is a strange thing, though, that even liberty- 
enjoying people may sink rapidly to robbing others of liberty. It 
is well-known that a Yankee wife of a slaveholder in the South 
United States and a Yankee overseer of slaves were the most 
cruel of slave drivers, just as renegades try to show their loyalty 
to their new masters by outdoing them. Occasionally Russian 
statesmen acknowledge that the grinding poverty of sixty million 
peasants can no longer be ignored safely. The farmers look in 
vain to the Czar or to a Prince Oldenburg, but the officials con- 
tinue to take all the farmers have, to pay royal and church taxes, 
or to compel them to sell their crops in autumn, at any price, to 
pay the taxes, which amounts to the same as taking everything. 
The moujik's only solace is in getting drunk to forget his misery. 

The founders of our American government intended to give 
even* family a free home of 160 acres of land through its home- 
stead and pre-emption laws, but where one person has benefited 
legitimately by complying with the law thousands of instances of 
evasions have enabled land grabbers to absorb the larger tracts of 
land. 

Conservatism tends to pile up wealth though organization and 
a settled method of earning and accumulating becomes the ac- 
cepted and usual one. Interferences with these customary affairs 
provoke opposition whether the interference is to rob the organiza- 
tion or prevent it from robbing others. Priesthoods with interests 
vested in maintaining superstition rave with anger if a reformer 
unsettles things. Capitalists embarked in a commercial undertak- 
ing, however ethical or piratical, suppress any opposition whether 
the opposition is to benefit the public or not at their expense. 

The present Greeks have a priest or monk to each 200 of the 
population and the miracles of the Virgin take the place of all the 
ancient oracles and other priestcraft. 

Queen Olga had the bible translated into modern Greek as the 
common people do not understand classic Greek, and the profes- 
sors and students raised a riot of protest against disturbing their 
"vested interests." As Tom Hood says, the Rae Wilsons would, 
if possible, make a rotten borough of heaven. The Borgia and de 



356 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND III S MIND. 

Medici families arranged to group their tombs about that of 
•Christ, which they tried to have brought to Italy, and thus grab 
the exclusive right to paradise which this kind of sepulchre would 
secure them. 

Another instance of vested interests preserved occurs in the 
theological domination of colleges by ecclesiastical professors at 
high salaries teaching their ignorant but "moral" nonsense, while 
a scientific professor in the same place is snubbed with a small 
salary, unless he is a sensational sciolist, when the noise he makes 
entitles him to nearly as much as the holy men get. 

The development of selfishness is seen in higher conceptions of 
selfishness ; desires become broadened and to pander to them re- 
gard for others must be had, which in time becomes habit. The 
new plane of selfishness develops a still higher plane, and under 
the influence of multitudes of things working at the same time, 
such as ''religion," Mrs. Grundy and expediency ideas, the old 
original selfishness becomes hidden or altogether repressed and 
finally "altruism" appears in such steps as endowing institutions 
of charity and learning, in order to perpetuate the name of the 
philanthropist. 

The utter change of selfishness into generosity suggests the dif- 
ferences between the inorganic and organic compounds, though 
the latter is made of the former. 

A dramatic conception could be framed of the idea that an evil 
influence defied a higher power to destroy selfishness in a world 
founded upon it, and by natural processes step by step selfishness 
was converted into generosity, egoism into altruism. But this is 
a scientific use of the imagination, not a new theological doctrine. 

Repeatedly in the experiences of the world some one person 
and his family managed to get control of the service of other fam- 
ilies by fair or foul means and in time the exactions grew more 
and more hard to bear. Occasionally a people was sturdy enough 
to put a limit to these demands, but the rule was that submission 
grew with arrogance till there was a great gulf between the com- 
mon people and the "chosen of the Lord." Barons would here 
and there grow into kings, through aggression and favorable cir- 
cumstances, and make the lesser barons and their subjects serve 
them. If this king oppressed both barons and people a little too 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 357 

much we may have an instance of the barons actually siding- with 
the people and forcing concessions, such as Magna Charta from 
King John. Little kings reigning over small districts, such as 
those into which England was divided, struggled against each 
other in time for over-kingship, or kings over kings. Emperor 
was a title more generally adopted for that position later. The 
same struggle went on in Ireland but there was lack of cohesion 
among the subjects of petty kingdoms there, and instead of over- 
kings subjugating the under-kings the under-kings multiplied and 
fought one another, so that while England in this respect was like 
the many-celled animal governed by a central nervous system, Ire- 
land was still in the fission stage of casting off cells from cells, 
without forming a central governing ganglion. 

It matters nothing what the one in control may be called, 
whether one of a party, as an oligarchy, a priesthood, a cabal, a 
Tammany political society, a baron, count, duke or king, emperor 
or tyrant, the principle remains the same, the mere name tells 
nothing as to what the people receive in the way of government. 
A president may have tyrannical aspirations, and one who reigns 
as dictator or tyrant may be mild and just, but the people attach 
such importance to mere titles that a change of name calms them, 
as though painting the leopard changed its nature. Augustus ap- 
peased the Romans as a title for rulers, and presidente in South 
American states covers more brutal tyrannous power than Caesar 
could imagine. Sparta was an oligarchy and Athens a democracy 
and friend of the people, hence to some extent there was class 
war all over Greece. The nobles were for Sparta and the people 
for Athens. But history is full of kings grabbing from the people 
and each other, over-kings putting them down, barons swelling 
into counts, dukes and lords or kings reducing other kings to 
underlordship. So long as the upper ruler was recognized as 
such the under rulers could be imbecile or otherwise impotent fig- 
ure-heads. When Bismarck was told of the dementia of the kings 
of Saxony and Bavaria he said it would make them all the safer 
as kings for his imperial master. 

Charles the Second of Spain and his wife were rapacious in 
the extreme. She vented her spite against Cortez because he re- 
served for his wife some jewels she coveted. The bloodthirsty 



35S THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Aztecs were robbed by the cruel Spaniards and the royal pair 
wanted to grab everything their undergrabber Cortez could bring, 
to the last trinket Cortez saved for his wife. And these were the 
Lord's anointed. And again names were no guide to the nature 
of the robbery. "Benevolences" were a species of extortion by 
Edward II, Richard II, and Edward IV, wherein direct canvass 
was made among the subjects for gifts. Under "free will offer- 
ings" blackmail extortion was practiced of the meanest sort. Evo- 
lution has improved this process by disguising it from the loyal 
subjects, but were it to cease they would be amazed at how sud- 
denly rich the common people would grow. 

After the conquest and pillage of Mexico, Bogota and Peru 
the Spaniards looked for new fields and started on the quest of 
"El Dorado." It was in the search for the seven cities of Cibola, 
said to be paved with gold, that caused Coronado's march north- 
ward into what is now Colorado and the Black Hills of the United 
States, in Dakota, and the disasters that overtook his party. Ponce 
de Leon wanted to grab eternal youth in his search for the fabu- 
lous springs of Florida, very much as the equally childish-minded 
alchemists sought for the "elixir of life" and the philosopher's 
stone that could turn all baser metals into gold. 

The old Persian Saadi ("The Gulistan") records instances of 
rapacity being robbed by the rapacious, a caliph robbing a tax 
collector, a king shamed into justice, cases of extortion, pretexts, 
subterfuges, and mentions that an orphan's cries shake the 
Almighty's throne (but the shaking does not seem to help the or- 
phan). The bible speaks of swallowers of widow's houses and 
the old records point to the ancients having all the animal's pro- 
pensities up to date. 

The celebrated impeachment case of Warren Hastings, 1785 
to 1795, was brought to a lame and impotent conclusion through 
no more money existing to carry on the contest. Hastings 
grabbed for England from the Rajahs who grabbed from the Hin- 
doos, and England kicked Hastings for having no more to sur- 
render. 

The League of Greece was directed to mere plunder, and sel- 
fish political aggrandizement was what brought the Romans into 
Greece. "In the end, B. C. 189, the League was stripped by the 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 359 

Romans of oven its nominal independence and sank into con- 
temptible servitude. 8 * A people who appeal to a foreign nation to 
help them usually end in being subjugated by the foreigners. 
Often has distress appealed for help and found itself in the 
clutches of money sharks. 

Piracy in the days of King William was very common and re- 
spectable in New York, and even parsons had interests in the 
"Red Sea trade" and would not favor attacks upon their sources 
of revenue. 

The daring reformer would be destroyed were he to attempt 
opposition to established customs such as those of New York 
merchants who grew rich and happy upon the murder and robbery 
by their sailors and ships outfitted for pirate business. At pres- 
ent we have advanced to disguising from our families and our- 
selves any transactions practically piratical but not usually re- 
garded as such. 

The history of the Panama canal scandal is recent in which 
there was royal sanction for wholesale robbery of the French peo- 
ple, and in such intrigue more often the honest opposer of it is 
crushed by the victims he seeks to benefit. 

Knaves will desert a cause they see is failing whether it is 
good or bad, but the best and the worst organizations will attract 
to it those who are on the watch for place and plunder. So we 
find bad men sometimes heading a good cause and rascals have 
managed to worm themselves into high places in church, state 
and society, posing often as representatives of exalted principles. 

Diodorus Siculus says that "though slaves and criminals en- 
riched their masters to an incredible extent by toiling night and 
day, compelled by the lash to work so incessantly that they died 
of the hardships in the caverns they had themselves dug and such 
as by great vigor continued alive were in such misery that death 
was preferable." The aborigines were forced into the mines by 
Spaniards in the new world as the Carthaginians traded in human 
beings to find slaves for their mines in the Iberian peninsula. 

The investigation of the coal miners' strike in 1902 in Penn- 
sylvania revealed incredible instances of rapacity on the part of 
mine owners who practically enslaved working men and children, 

E. A. Freeman, History of Feudal Government, 1, ch. 7-9. 



360 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

and the subsequent endeavor of coal dealers in the large cities to 
conspire with railways to make a fictitious shortage to control 
prices was equally characteristic, resulting in the perishing of 
thousands by cold and the enriching of a few coal barons. Slavery 
has many disguises. Baer says he owns the mines by "divine 
right," the same old claim of the grabber. 

One of the most apparent filchers of everything, in the way of 
a society, was the Tammany political order of New York. One 
of its head rascals, Tweed, held that every man had his price and 
acted upon that idea. He stole from the people, and his family, 
enriched by his thievery, deserted him and allowed him to die in 
the Tombs prison. They inherited his heartlessness. 

While pretending to oppose trusts in behalf of the people who 
were robbed by them, Tammany arranged one of the most cruel 
affairs of that nature, an ice trust, which would have literally 
emptied the pennies from the pockets of the poor. The Mazet in- 
quiry in New York City shows that Croker was selling human 
bodies to the hospitals, but this is merely a feature of boodleism, 
his blackmailing of big corporations and the police selling pro- 
tection to saloonkeepers, thieves and prostitutes are also mere inci- 
dents of this species of grab game. While I was pathologist of 
the Chicago Insane Asylum the county commissioners told me 
that the relatives of the dead patients objected to autopsies, and 
it took me some time to ascertain that this was a mere invented 
pretext to enable these commissioners to sell the bodies for $30 
each to medical colleges, and this again is a mere incident in po- 
litical stealings, for when politicians have charge of public char- 
ities and control asylums, poor houses and hospitals, the poor and 
sick receive about a tenth of what is appropriated and are mal- 
treated besides. 

These politicians usually grow gradually bolder in their greed 
and make their onslaughts upon the people more and more direct, 
for instance, at one time the New York aldermen tried to build 
dwellings for themselves in Central Park, and professed that they 
could not understand why they should not be permitted to do so. 
An extension of this spirit would have restored the Egyptian cor- 
vee and the multitude would have been hauling stones for alder- 
manic palaces. And these aldermen were of the "plain people" 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 36 1 

also, a hint that human nature extends from the king on his throne 
to the monkey who grabs cocoanuts from his. weaker brethren in 
the trees. Tammany also grew bold enough in iqoi to put chairs 
in the park for which there was to be pay collected for sitting in 
them. This innovation led to a mob destruction of the chairs ; 
so the people sometimes recognize and resent imposition, and rob- 
bery, but not always. Imposition, by the way, is derived from the 
French word for tax, and tariff comes from the word Tarifa, 
where pirates exacted tribute from Mediterranean trade. In the 
one case the word has grown to indicate something reprehensible 
and in the other case a dreaded name has grown respectable. The 
high tariff Hohenzollern family is very exalted in Germany. 

Spencer mentions the great opposition of the small traders in 
the outlying towns against good roads being built to London be- 
cause they would lose trade, not caring for the benefit the peo- 
ple would secure ; similarly department stores which sell every- 
thing for reduced prices were fought by small storekeepers who 
could not compete with the low prices, and asked customers to 
prefer their high prices. The "collective wisdom" of parliament 
undertook to arouse patriotism to the pitch of being willing to 
pay higher for English than for foreign goods by ordering the 
latter to be marked as such, and the "collective wisdom" was sur- 
prised to find that the marks attracted purchasers who fancied 
that goods from abroad were better than the domestic articles. 
Thus there was misapprehension through grabbing interests not 
comprehending each other. 

Then the people may exert individually their selfish notions 
to such a display as to attract demagogues who "give the people 
what they think they want," and this ignorance and mistaken sel- 
fishness in all ages have enabled the minority to rule over the ma- 
jority, whether in monarchy, oligarchy, republic or whatsoever 
government. 

Before the Union Pacific Railroad was built over the Ameri- 
can continent a canal across the isthmus would have been consid- 
ered a great blessing through shortening the distance to California 
by thousands of miles. When the great grab scheme that resulted 
in the construction of the railway was successful the railroad in- 
terests opposed the canal construction, while the Californians, 



362 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

knowing- it would cheapen freight rates, favored it. But later 
when China began to open up to traffic, California and the west 
generally opposed the canal construction, because it might take 
trade direct from New England to China, so the East Coast in- 
terests were aroused to favor the Xicaraugua Canal building. 
Thus short-sighted selfishness is universal in spite of it frequently 
happening that in the end all are benefited by a great innovation. 

Rulers like Nicholas III of Russia, however well intentioned, 
are surrounded by grabbers who oppose any concessions to the 
rabble, and there is incessant dinning of bad advice in the ears 
of all occupants of thrones and presidential chairs. General Grant 
was surrounded by sycophants who talked imperialism constantly. 
Americans can recall when there was a talk of "a strong govern- 
ment" by the spoils system element. 

A Pennsylvania senator who bought his way against the peo- 
ple's opposition refused to endorse a treaty of peace with Spain 
until he could use it as a means to blackmail or sandbag some one 
out of something. Public interests aie prostituted when a syndi- 
cate induces a school board to change from good text books to 
very inferior ones because a profit can be made by so doing, and 
changes in the army and navy uniforms are often made for con- 
tract profits to high officials though a hardship upon the salaries 
of officers affected. 

Walter Mapes in A. D. 1200, 4 the talented writer, described 
the rotten conditions of court and church. The whole spirit of 
Henry and his court in their struggle with Becket for supremacy 
is illustrated in the confession of the imaginary prelate Bishop 
Goliath. The veil is stripped from the corruption of the mediaeval 
church, its indolence, its thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The 
whole body of the clergy from pope to hedge priest is painted as 
busy in the chase for gain ; what escapes the bishop is snapped up 
by the archdeacon, what escapes the archdeacon is nosed and 
hunted down by the dean, while a host of minor officials prowl 
hungrily around these greater marauders. Out of the crowd of 
figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist vicars, ab- 
bots, purple as their wines, monks feeding and chattering together 
like parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine bishop, light of 

4 Green's History of England, p. 150. 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 363 

purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, 
the Goliath who sums up the enormities of all." 

In grateful contrast with these pictures are the touching de- 
scriptions of the village priest in Gerald Griffin's "Collegians." 
The dear old soul sacrifices all his comfort and time for the hum- 
blest of his parishioners, and in the Italian "I Promessi Sposi," 
the* broad-minded, kind-hearted bishop tries to head off the epi- 
demic resulting from almost animal ignorance of the people, who 
are preyed upon by a malevolent selfish parish priest, who would 
undo all the good work of his bishop for the profit the priest could 
secure. 

In the time of Charlemagne Benedict of Anaine was a terror 
to evil-minded monks through his writings. Montesquieu, 
though born an aristocrat, aimed a reaction against tyranny in 
general and absolute monarchy in particular. He desired to de- 
stroy despotism and elevate the idea of individual freedom. He 
clung to constitutional monarchy; an optimist by temperament 
though a democrat by conviction. He originated "citoyen" in 
place of "subject." He hoped much from Louis XV, but when 
he saw that today w r as to be as yesterday and burdens were not to 
be removed Montesquieu became the mouthpiece of the revolution. 
In his Parisian letters he touches upon the weakness of France 
in political, ecclesiastical and social arrangements. 

During the civil war in the United States, Austria and France 
attempted to steal Mexico, but when the war ended Napoleon 
withdrew his French troops and left Maximilian . to get out of 
Mexico with his Austrians the best he could. The Mexicans cap- 
tured and shot him. The Monroe doctrine is based upon the 
necessity of keeping European monarchies from gaining any more 
control on this continent than they have got already, for with 
their past histories their greed would surely cause grab after grab 
until the United States would be on the defensive for existence. 
It is best to protect the small states from all dangers, even that of 
their own imbecile management, rather than have them clutched 
by rapacious foreigners who would soon have their fingers on our 
throat. The principle in the Monroe doctrine is simply that so 
long as we can make Europe fear us those countries must be left 
alone. If Europe could combine to destroy us she would do it. 



364 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

The London Spectator calls our Monroe doctrine a "dog in 
the manger policy," that the United States will neither take South 
America nor allow anybody else to do so. 

The fate of Africa is simply that of a continent divided against 
itself and no one intefering with invaders. After Carthage was 
destroyed North Africa was ruled over by Rome. The Moslem 
conquests were from A. D. 640 to 1171. Egypt and the Soudan 
fell to them in 1250 and 15 17. The Portuguese explored the At- 
lantic coast in 141 5. Dutch and English colonization of South 
Africa followed with the establishment of Sierra Leone and Libe- 
ria, and in 1884 to 1891 the partition between European powers of 
the interior of Africa. Great Britain and Germany quarreled 
over respective spheres of influence on the Gulf of Guinea, but 
reached a compromise and France and Germany arrived at an 
understanding concerning the slave coast and Senegambia.-' 

The balance of power indicates an alliance of European states 
to keep each other from grabbing weaker states and thus strength- 
ening one at the expense of others. It is an armistice, a mere 
armed neutrality to be broken up whenever opportunity presents. 

When Japan uncovered China's weakness, Russia, England, 
Germany and France rushed in to secure "spheres of influence," 
like a lot of children finding that a school bully was really a cow- 
ard and conclude to empty his pockets. Even Italy came swag- 
gering along for a division. Japan captured the important fortifi- 
cation Port Arthur from the Chinese, and was quietly dispos- 
sessed of it by Russia. Japan has been watching the abstraction 
of Manchuria and control of Corea by Russia, but wisely bides the 
time when a protest can be effective. 

When the Turkish janissaries were killed off by the Sultan 
Russia promptly demanded a new treaty from Turkey. In 1878 
Turkey was prostrate and Russia was preparing to capture Con- 
stantinople, but a British fleet was sent through the Dardanelles. 
In 1894 the Armenian outrages grew offensive, but as no Eu- 
ropean interest was affected these Christian subjects of Turkey 
were permitted to< perish. 

The United States has been no exception to the rule that na- 

5 A. S. White, The Development of Africa, 1892, also J. S. Keltic, The 
Partition of Africa, ch. 12, 33. 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 365 

tions grab territory when and where they can. Of course there 
are plenty of reasons, as thick as blackberries, but call it purchase, 
treaty or what you will, it amounts to the same in the end, and 
probably our government has been less mean and rapacious and 
more inclined to give an equivalent than others in history. We 
settled on Xew England lands on which Indians roamed, but they 
could show no deeds for it. We acquired lands from France and 
Spain which those countries had absorbed from the savages by 
"divine right" of might. We made numbers of treaties with wild 
tribes in the west only to break those treaties when it suited us, 
under the pretext that the savages made no proper use of the coun- 
try ceded to them — the idea of ceding land they already owned! 
Then we kept them moving farther on till what the Indian trader 
and the Indian agent and the white man's whiskey and diseases 
left of them could be gathered into still smaller reservations. 
Helen Jackson sums up many of the dishonorable dealings of the 
United States government with some of the Indian tribes, in a 
book with a preface by Bishop Whipple, who was as earnest as 
Father De Smet in trying to help the Indian against the white 
man's swindling. But the matter is treated as though it were 
unique when it is merely the old world's grabbing way ever since 
there was anything to grab. The Cherokees still have an old 
claim against the government, and the last Cherokee will be its 
heir. 

The average American, like the average patriot in any other 
land, imagines that his country alone should expand until all con- 
tiguous territory w T as taken in. Filibuster© Walker in 185 5- 1860 
tried to annex Mexico, and later W. A. C. Ryan, another filibus- 
tero, surrendered his life to the Spaniards in an endeavor to walk 
off with Cuba. Poor Jameson tried to rush South Africa into 
Great Britain and w^as scolded for his failure, but his successors 
finished the work he pioneered. England has good grab and hold- 
on abilities. Mark Twain said that there is a special verse in the 
bible that refers to England, it is, "Blessed are the meek, for they 
shall inherit the earth." 

In 1898 the Nile question in Egypt was discussed by England 
and France and Marchand tried the rush to Fashoda and found 
that the English had some very compromising correspondence 



366 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

that had passed between the French commanders and the natives 
with uncomfortable reference to the English troops. On the final 
settlement France let England have her way, as usual. 

There is a diversity of opinion as to the Philippines. Senator 
Hoar denies our right to hold them under the Constitution, but 
that elastic instrument may permit us to annex the world, in time, 
when we are strong enough. The United States has revoked 
treaties with China and Indians and Latin American states, but 
never with a country strong enough to object. 

And the grab desire grows with success, but occasionally is re- 
buked. There was a Norman invasion of the Byzantine empire 
which, in 1085, failed. Charlemagne was something of a grab- 
ber of territory extending from the North Sea to the Mediter- 
ranean, but like many another testator he failed to keep the prop- 
erty in the family, though desirous of doing so. "When Duke 
Charles the Bold was slain by the Swiss, in 1477, Louis XI of 
France eagerly grabbed Burgundy. In the Roman conquest of 
Italy an agrarian law enacted that no citizen should own more 
than five hundred acres of land, but this attempt to limit the 
human grab instinct failed through violations of the law by the 
rich. Gracchus supported the law but an avaricious senate de- 
stroyed him. Similarly the homestead and pre-emption laws of 
America are subverted by capital, and the best endeavors to ben- 
efit the poor are foiled by the persons the law seeks to benefit 
playing into the hands of the unscrupulous. Absenteeism in Ire- 
land is another item of oppression. The lands being grabbed by 
nobility, the owners of about half of the land do not live on or near 
their estates, while a fourth do not live in the country at all, the 
people regard it as a grievance and think that twenty-five to thirty 
million dollars paid to these landlords is a tax grievous to be 
borne, 6 particularly when no repairs are made and the tenants 
are regarded as merely profitable cattle. 

Chivalrous deeds are nowadays presumed to have a touch of 
high minded unselfishness about them, the doing good to others 
without reference to self-interest, but chivalry came from cavalry 
and the assumption that one on horseback was better than one 
who walked. Cavalier, caballero, synonymous with gentleman, 

6 D. B. King, The Irish Question, p. 5-11. 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 367 

implies that the foot man is no gentleman, so honor is grabbed by 

the one strong enough to own a horse. 

Spanish hidalgos grabbed the very vitals of Cuba and the re- 
concentrado was ending the remnant of the people. Shafter and 
Sampson grabbed positions that should have been filled by civil 
service military, instead of by spoils system politicians, because 
bureaucrats conspired to grab the places for them, but General 
Miles and Commodores Schley and Dewey ended the Spanish 
army and navy in spite of Secretary Long, Sampson, Shafter and 
the Spaniards. 

In benighted periods the inventor was liable to the charge of 
sorcery and was burned alive for daring to do anything for his 
fellow men, but nowadays he is merely robbed and only killed if 
disagreeably persistent about asking for royalties. The publisher 
or manufacturers charge an extra price on books and instruments 
to cover the author or inventor royalty percentage, but which the 
author or inventor rarely hears from. So under the lying plea 
of rewarding study and talent the public is robbed as well as the 
student and creator of materials sold. 

It is a common trick of some manufacturers to induce special 
ability to confide some secret process to them and then appropriate 
it without recompense and retaliate with abuse of the inventor if 
he is at all resentful about being robbed. It is exactly the same 
kind of cruelty that leads the highwayman to brutally beat a help- 
less victim. 

A chemist named E. B. Stuart has been repeatedly swindled 
out of the proceeds of his numerous valuable inventions in glu- 
cose and other processes, and even out of the processes them- 
selves. Finally he was employed in an official capacity to make 
chemical and microscopical tests and lost his place because too 
honest to accept bribes from food adulterators. But Professor 
Stuart, in considering the intellectual degradation of the average 
successful politician or dishonest business man, remarked that he 
was very glad that he was not capable of becoming rich. 

The populace have a vague idea that great enterprises advance 
mechanical and other improvements bearing upon their interests ; 
this is only true to the extent of what the limited intelligence of 
those in control recognize as furthering their immediate interests. 



368 THE EVOLUTION OE MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Seeing ahead very far is too great an effort for them as a rule. 
So corporations, such as telegraph and telephone, have obtained 
control of improvements in message conveying, electric light com- 
panies in illuminating facilities, coal oil companies in refining 
and utilizing processes, and some of the inventions are of value, 
but the idea of benefiting the multitude is a mere accidental out- 
come of any calculation of the monopoly, a mere incident and 
never an object, so very often these improvements are shelved and 
forgotten because the expense of their installation would cut 
down dividends temporarily, even though both company and pub- 
lic would profit finally by their adoption. Czars, kings and cor- 
porations are alike in such matters. Nero only ordered free baths 
to be constructed because his royal nostrils were offended by the 
bad smell of his subjects. 

Marconi. experimented with wireless telegraphy across the At- 
lantic and was served with an injunction by the transatlantic cable 
company. Thus organized selfishness tries to stop the world's 
progress. Business instinct asks if this or that advance may not 
hurt my vested interests, and if so can it not be suppressed ? 

A harvester manufacturing company's president offered an 
inventor $500 for an improved binding process, but was laughed 
at, for, said the inventor, "millions of dollars can be made from 
it." The president replied, "I pay a lawyer $10,000 a year to 
fight inventors, and I will use your patent anyway, whether I buy 
it or not." The vestibule addition to car platforms was openly 
appropriated by a great car builder and litigation was necessary 
to secure compensation. A new town was projected by the same 
capitalist, who advertised that he would pay well for the best 
process of brick making. When those who responded described 
their methods the wealthy town builder had a stenographer be- 
hind a screen take down the details. He put together all the best 
ideas confided to him and made his own brick and gave nothing 
in return for the advice. 

William A. Brickell, a fireman of New York, invented and 
perfected a process whereby the hitching of horses to the fire en- 
gine automatically detaches parts, a fire is lighted in the grate and 
before the engine gets a hundred yards from the house there is a 
full head of steam on. This has resulted in the prompt saving of 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 369 

thousands of lives and has kept millions of property from the 
flames, but BrickeH's invention was used without compensation 
and he died poor after twenty years' legal endeavor to have his 
patents respected. 

A reservoir bursts loose in the mountains and a valley town 
is swept away, with many persons drowned. The survivors are 
sent money, clothing and food in reckless abundance. The com- 
mittee selected or self-appointed to distribute these gifts exhibits 
personal wealth soon after. After the great Chicago fire of 1871 
several million dollars was contributed from all over the world, 
and some of those to whom the money was sent are now multi- 
millionaires, when previously they were in moderate and even 
humble conditions of life. But a hint of this to relations and 
friends of the wealthy "philanthropists" will produce an angry 
frown. 

Spencer speaks of unexpected results of apparently beneficent 
movements. Nothing should be simpler than that charities should 
be organized and beggars referred to the central office for inves- 
tigation of their claims and worthiness, so all charity funds should 
be entrusted by the charitable to officers and not to the beggars. 
The result is a few office-holders thrive on salaries which must 
be paid, and the salaries increase in amount and numbers with 
the sums received, and very little is left over for the needy. 

Animals and plants constructed of many cells working in har- 
mony for the general good of the colony of cells that form the 
individual are very much like the social organism constructed of 
men, women and children. Each cell labors in its own interest, 
its nature does not permit it to care anything about its neighbor 
cell, and if anything one cell may do happens to benefit another 
ceil, or part of the body, it is not intended, and so the individuals 
of a nation while working for themselves alone may under or- 
ganization assist one another unintentionally, until finally the 
helping one another, whether as cells or persons, becomes inevi- 
table as a condition of their lives. They would not do it if they 
could help not doing so, and at least they seek recompense for 
any extra service to one another over and above the enforced mu- 
tuality. 

Acquisitiveness is merely the grab desire inherent in every 



370 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS M*ND. 

tissue of an individual, in every molecule and every atom that 
cannot exist apart, and must associate itself with another atom, 
either of its own kind or some other kind of elements, so that 
a single centre in the brain for this faculty is not possible. All 
desires of whatsoever kind are based upon the grabbing propensi- 
ties. As desires differ also and develop, one individual wanting 
social or other distinction, another money, another food in the 
main, so covetousness must engage many parts of the brain. The 
good-natured hotel-keeper deficient in grasp is often so imposed 
upon as to be bankrupted, and those who have roomy mansions 
are beset with self-invited parasites, and they realize the truth 
of the verse "Riches multiply those who devour them." Even 
ordinary visits may become visitations, and a good-sized portion 
of every community scuttles around in search of cover to be. won 
by flattery, subserviency or harsher means. The hermit crab 
crawls into any old shell or empty hole, and has been seen in 
toy pitchers or other cast-off materials affording shelter. A 
naturalist observed one insinuate himself backwards into a large 
empty conch shell and suddenly give a start and hurriedly run 
out to turn around and re-enter, head and claws foremost, back- 
ing out with a smaller crab which it contemptuously cast away 
and then settled down to complacent possession. Many a human 
parasite has acted much the same when affronted by some sharer 
of the hovel or palace, cave or tree, and even island or continent, 
if strong enough to dispute possession. 

A physician steadily resisted the business advice to introduce 
some attractive humbuggery into his sanitarium, such as dosing 
spring water with salt and advertising its wonderful curative 
properties. Depending upon skill and learning, and while neg- 
lecting business details and devoting himself wholly to intelligent 
care of patients he could brook no dishonesty in his dealings with 
them, so the delighted public swindled him by living upon his 
overcultivated sympathies and failing to pay for board. 

About 1877 the Minnesota legislature offered a bounty of one 
dollar a bushel for grasshoppers because there was a plague of 
them and famine was threatened through their destruction of 
crops. A Methodist preacher worked all one Sunday capturing 
grasshoppers and chased people from his farm with threats to 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 37 1 

anyone who would steal his grasshoppers. This can be taken as 
an instance o\ the consistency of those who pretend to teach what 
•will result in the spiritual and bodily welfare of others. That 
minister could prate of helping communities and individuals, but 
when money was to be made by ridding the country of grasshop- 
pers did not w r ant anyone to steal his grasshoppers. 

In England merchants, hotelkeepers and others use the guinea, 
as it is a shilling more than a pound, and enables extortion from 
those who confuse the guinea and the pound. 

When a child is sent to the grocer or butcher for a purchase 
the average dealer tries to cheat the little one, gives it what it did 
not come for or makes false change. When servants take little 
interest in the welfare of a household tradesmen give short weight 
and make false entries. Tea, coffee, sugar, coal, etc., afford the 
most convenient materials for swindling by means of overcharg- 
ing and underweighing; frequently goods never delivered are 
charged and paid for. When dealers make Christmas presents 
to servants the master of the house is the one who has paid for 
them without knowing it. Bearing on habit and instinct the 
grabbing propensity may be so ingrained that there are actually 
persons w T ho w^ould prefer to make a dollar dishonestly than ten 
dollars honestly. This is the gambler's instinct and a form of 
love of excitement. Board of trade dealers, bucket shop and clock 
game men, stock jobbers, and the multitude of speculators, many 
of whom are refined, gentlemanly cut-throats, are of this class. 

Wheat pits, railroad and steamship companies, and other vast 
corporations fight tooth and nail for personal gain and yet serve 
unconsciously the mighty world purpose of feeding London and 
other great cities, or large areas. of population elsewhere, from 
the surplus of western fields of grain. Intestinal cells may simi- 
larly try to eat up everything, but the bulk of material goes else- 
where in the body for consumption. 

People who are quite honest ordinarily, and in their commer- 
cial dealings as "honesty" goes, may not hesitate at a literary 
theft, at keeping a friend's book forever or permanently borrow- 
ing an umbrella. One may also be quite punctiliously honest 
in little things, but steal a railroad deliberately and designedly. 

On the first of an April day an elevator man of a large office 



37 2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

building put a pocketboo,k on the floor of his cage and during the 
day twenty who noticed the book tried to secretly take it, while 
only four others called his attention to it, the others had not seen 
it, and these crowds represent a large class who lose opportunities 
for gain, however disposed to be honest or dishonest. 

A fashionable money-making practitioner told me that he 
would rather have a patient die on his hands than to call in a 
consultant who might save the patient's life. That is the business 
instinct occasionally in medical practice. Business enterprise in 
professional matters sometimes goes to greater lengths. A quack 
who was a president of a "school of osteopathy," a humbug trav- 
esty of massage, claimed that he bought dead bodies from the 
attendants of an insane asylum for $30 each, and he was told 
that he could pick out his subjects "on the hoof" from dements 
in the "killer ward." Now this sounds preposterous, but "hold 
up" men will murder for a dollar, and these identical thugs have 
often been given attendants' places in asylums. If willing to mur- 
der for one dollar would they hesitate for thirty? 

An estimate of the costs of births, in large cities was placed 
at $23, marriages $76.50 and deaths $170. The cause of this is 
that happiness is taken advantage of as being likely to be gen- 
erous, just as the cabman wants to overcharge for wedding trips, 
but when grief causes indifference to expense a better chance for 
charging is secured. 

Graveyards are incorporated "forever," and when the dead 
are forgotten the graveyard is cut up into building lots and sold. 
One or two wealthy tomb-holders maintained their rights, 
through the supreme court of appeals, to their property in the 
cemetery which afterwards became Lincoln Park in Chicago, but 
all other graves were destroyed. Often money is taken by sex- 
tons to keep graves in repair, and lies are told when their neglect 
is discovered. 

The extremely wealthy may combine in a trust to rob the poor 
and end by robbing each other, though many trusts accidentally 
and unintentionally benefit the people as a result of but not as an 
intention of the combination. 

When yellow fever came to Louisiana commercialism tried to 
hide its nature by giving it false names, as Bayou fever, malaria, 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 373 

etc. In 1630 the same thing was done in Lombard v. In New- 
Orleans Dr. Holt was denounced by press and pulpits for his ef- 
forts to suppress the epidemic owing to the interference with 
profits of the merchants. In 1884 I appealed to Chicago mer- 
chants to assist in preventing political abuses and robbery of the 
insane at the county asylum, and discovered that merchants sold 
inferior goods at high prices to the commissioners and divided 
the profits of starvation and other neglect and brutality of the 
helpless inmates. 

The Illinois Central Railroad was permitted to occupy ten 
miles of the lake front in Chicago with tracks. In fifty years the 
extensions of the company towards the city and by making new 
ground from the lake would approximate in value five hundred 
million dollars in value, and it required the incessant opposition 
of a committee of property owners and the instruction of twenty 
years or more of editorial comments, with occasional injunctions, 
to limit this gigantic grab to* its final dimensions. A piece of land 
also adjoining the lake front was given to the state by the general 
government and the rats, ferrets and snakes of common councils, 
art societies, legislatures, confidence combinations did all they 
could to get this property from the people by all kinds of pre- 
texts, and the tricksters are gradually succeeding. 

A street called Dix, adjoining the Chicago and Northwestern 
depot, gradually became more and more slender between rows 
added to rows of railway tracks until the street vanished from 
the surface of the earth, as hundreds of other streets in Chicago 
and thousands elsewhere where rich corporations such as railways 
needed them, have gone. 

The trail of a grabber may lead into several directions. What 
was known as the "forty thieves' legislature" of Wisconsin had 
an agent, a clerk of the house of representatives, who was in- 
trusted with forty thousand dollars to be divided among the 
•'solons" to enable a corporation measure to be passed, the clerk 
divided five thousand and kept thirty-five thousand, moving to 
Dakota he corrupted the United States Survey Service and sug- 
gested a gas company to be formed by a lot of small stockholders 
who were to be gradually frozen out; that is, they were to be 
so discouraged by fraudulent management that they would sell 



374 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

their stock for trifling sums. A similar stock company was 
formed in a great city which grew rapidly with the relatively 
small capital of $100,000. In twenty years the stock and prop- 
erty valuation of the gas plant was eighty million dollars, made 
by swindling the public in many ways, and the ownership by this 
freezing out process centered among a few with criminal instincts, 
one of whom spends his time with gamblers and lewd company. 
He knows no more satisfactory means of recreation. By false 
meters and registering of the gas consumed the ordinary tenant 
is robbed annually of from $25 to $200 or more, and in a city with 
a hundred thousand consumers the aggregate w r ould make baron- 
ial feudal tribute small indeed. And practically this unjust 
monthly assessment is slavery, feudalism, brigandage or what- 
soever the politer equivalent for picking pockets may be. 

The reigning Tartar grabbers of Manchuria pocketed China 
in ancient days, but the modern empress dowager grabbed the 
throne because the young emperor was too progressive and really 
wanted his people to be better off; this desire of the emperor 
to help the people was shocking to the grabbing courtiers, who 
laugh at the idea of benefiting any one but yourself. The em- 
peror wanted to stop opium eating and divert the incomes of the 
temples to schools. He further wanted to liberate Korea. In 
1898 he prohibited the appointment of bigoted conservatives who 
adhere to obsolete and unpractical customs, and instituted scien- 
tific studies in civil service reform examinations. Sweeping gen- 
eral reforms were commanded. Dismissed officials appealed to 
the ignorant conservative old dowager empress, who disposed of 
the radical and took the government upon herself. In 1895 mis- 
sionaries were murdered by Chinese at Hua Sang, and in 1897 
reparation w r as demanded by Germany for missionaries who were 
murdered in that year, so to pacify the Kaiser part of Kiaochau 
was "leased" for 99 year's to Germany. 

Then foreign demands increased by 1898 and concession grab- 
bing increased to satisfy the British, French, Russian, German 
and Belgian governments, who took advantage of the whipping 
Japan had just given to China. In 1901 the "Boxer" opposition 
to the foreigners broke out, and under a pretext of a revolution 
the empress directed the legations to be destroyed, but by August 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 375 

Pekin was captured by the allies, who, with the exception of 
American. British and Japanese troops, were quite brutal to their 
captives. There was great international jealousy and looting, 
and finally the terms of conquests were arranged and a large in- 
demnity demanded to cover the expenses of the war. Thus poor 
old China thought it owned heaven and earth, and its ignorant 
rulers grabbed all the rights away from its subjects and foreign 
grabbers completed the game. So China will learn and will 
progress through compulsion. The nations want China to buy 
cannons and ammunition, and thus the world is forced to move 
whether it wants to do so or not, because the grab differentiation 
commands the conservatives to die or move on, and thus selfish- 
is a factor in progress, and the main one. 

The nations demanded indemnities so large they were beyond 
possibility of payment. Even Italy came in with an extravagant 
claim. But when it comes to looting, officials can be very im- 
partial between taking from foreigners or from their own coun- 
trymen. The great surplus occasioned by the war tax collec- 
tions that were unused in the United States Treasury in 1902 
tempted the congressmen to return the fund to the people in such 
a way as would best conduce to their re-election to congress, by 
giving public improvements where they would "do the most good" 
to politicians. 

Guttenberg and Coster were driven through Germany as sor- 
cerers and wrenched the art of printing from poverty and misery. 
Palissy, the pauper potter, burned his last stick of furniture to 
finish his secret of enameling. The stocking knitter was invented 
by poverty-stricken Lee. James Gordon worked many years to 
invent his grain reaper amidst opposition, sneers, slander, priva- 
tion and anxiety, and finally a rich company appropriated it, but 
his long fight ended in a decision in his favor. The original in- 
ventor of lacing-hooks on shoes confided in a friend who at once 
secured patents and wealth, and the real inventor got nothing. 
The inventor of interlocking horns with balls at the ends for 
snapping closed pocketbooks and gloves received a kidney stew 
dinner and fifty cents from the man who made a handsome for- 
tune out of the profits. A patent on a bottle-stopper was bought 
for a thousand dollars and subsequently independently of any 



376 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

agreement thirty thousand was voluntarily given to the inventor 
by the purchaser who made five million dollars from the inven- 
tion. Were inventors always treated as fairly as this there could 
be little complaint, but this act of generosity is exceptional in 
such cases. 

Patenting an invention is no assurance of protection in all 
cases ; inventors of small articles know their ideas will be stolen 
anyway, and so they rush out as many articles as possible to fill 
the market before infringing imitators acquire the bulk of the 
trade. Some big "inventor's" agents examine caveats and new 
patents to enable them to appropriate all new ideas possible with- 
out recompense. 

The Panama canal scheme resulted in the French stockholders 
being robbed of all they had invested. Great lies were spread 
as to the fortunes to be made by investors, and the company lux- 
uriated in a drunken frenzy of wealth on both sides of the At- 
lantic ; the management was so corrupt and careless that machin- 
ery and stores of the corporation were allowed to be lost and 
destroyed without efforts being made to save them. Locomo- 
tives worth five thousand dollars would fall off the tracks, and 
instead of being replaced would be buried under hills of dirt. 
Every conceivable rascality was practiced in the pretense of this 
canal construction and finally the end came with much hysterics 
and attempts at revenge. Poor de Lesseps, who had successfully 
engineered the Suez canal, was engaged in the new affair merely 
as a figure-head by the schemers, who took advantage of his se- 
nility to impose upon him and the public they robbed, and it is 
surmised that the French owners of the ruins of the Panama 
canal have made great efforts to interest the United States Con- 
gress by means similar to those used in Pacific Mail days. 

O. W. Holmes, in his "Autocrat," remarks : 

"When publishers no longer steal, 
And pay for what they stole before, 

And when you see that blessed day 
Then order your ascension robe." 

Bovee suggests that "there is probably no hell for authors in 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 377 

the next world, as they suffer so much from critics and publish- 
ers in this." 

In the preface to the famous "Collegians" it is told of Griffin 
that he was robbed and abused by publishers and editors, and 
both he and Payne, the author of "Home, Sweet Home/' were 
swindled by theatrical managers. 

Max Miiller pursued his studies for many years unknown and 
unappreciated, and when his Rig Veda edition was about to ap- 
pear rich toadies wanted to share honors with him and pirates 
tried to steal from him. 

The usual arrangement between publisher and author is a very 
silly one ; w r orse than that, in view of human nature it is an im- 
becile one. The publisher keeps all accounts and the author has 
to depend upon the "honesty" of the publisher who is tempted to 
the furthest limit, as he may keep tw r o sets of books to cheat au- 
thors who force him into court or he may risk the authors' ever 
trying to gain an accounting by law, depending upon their pov- 
erty and ability to be bluffed. 

An old civil engineer who had .written a cyclopedia sold some 
of his books, and his publisher put him in jail for the theft of 
the books, as the author claimed the amount appropriated was 
due him on royalties unpaid. Another author deposited six hun- 
dred dollars with the same publisher for expenses in printing a 
mathematical w r ork. In thirty years the author barely recovered 
back his guaranty in royalties, while the publisher acknowledged 
to $3,000 profit, and how much more had really been collected will 
never be known except to the publisher. 

In this case the author paid all the expenses and got nothing 
but glory, and the publisher got all the profit. 

An author may have devoted his life to advocate certain prin- 
ciples and made use of his literary abilities as a mere means of 
presenting these principles. The commercial spirit of the pub- 
lisher sometimes studies the manuscript with a sole regard to 
getting money through its means, and ruthlessly expurgates and 
amends until the principle is mutilated beyond recognition, and 
the sage appears in "cap and bells," for the publisher realizes 
that "while the world admires the philosopher it will throw its 
pennies in the monkey's cap." 



37$ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Thackeray's "Yellow Plush Papers" were revised by the ed- 
itor of the Edinburgh Review beyond recognition in parts and 
Carlyle had to submit to Francis Jeffrey's dashing out and cut- 
ting out and writings in, and finally got to refusing Carlyle's 
writings altogether as not good enough for the Review. Dr. 
Billings of Sharon, Mass., paid a publisher of a semi-religious 
periodical to bring out a book. The publisher accepted the money, 
printed the book, and from religious motives did all he could to 
kill its sales. His religion admitted of defrauding an author un- 
der false pretenses. 

Some publishers combined to have a bill passed in the Xew 
York legislature requiring the use of larger types in printing 
books, and testimony was taken to show the effects of smaller 
type upon the eye. This pretext of consideration for the public 
was in the interests of publishers who wanted to prevent cheap 
editions of fine print popular books. Thus the people would be 
forced to pay higher prices under the trickery of regard for their 
eyesight preservation. 

A Philadelphia medical book publisher has been not only 
thievish with his authors, but also with his book agents, some- 
times giving them nothing for a year's canvassing. His stock 
in trade includes going into legal bankruptcy and bluffing all his 
victims with threats. He is extremely polite until his knavery 
is discovered, and then he adopts the usual animal tactics. When 
the fox is cornered he shows his teeth. 

A favorite method of robbing authors incidentally robs broth- 
er publishers, a work that has become popular is stolen outright 
from a foreign publisher and author and reproduced without 
compensation to the real or ostensible owners. The method of 
reprinting English works in Germany for a small cost and selling 
them in English-speaking countries has been successful in spite 
of copyright laws which afford little protection at best. 

Faust and Gutenberg are often spoken of as the inventors of 
movable types. The facts are Faust was a money-lender and 
let Gutenberg have money to carry on his experiments, and in 
1455 Faust foreclosed on all Gutenberg possessed just as the first 
work was being turned out from the presses. Gutenberg had 
been intent upon the invention while Faust looked out wholly for 



ACQUISITIVENESS. 379 

his personal interests, unscrupulous as to whom he wrecked or 
how his money was obtained. Years of labor can be converted 
remorselessly by commercial bandits, many of whom are high 
in the world's esteem and enjoy wealth from plunder of the poor 
and honest, who in some cases were driven to paupers' graves. 

Goodyear, the vulcanizer of India rubber, had much litigation 
to establish his rights, though it is not the rule for inventors to 
succeed financially. It is rare to find business ability with invent- 
ive genius. The single hearted worker in any field is too much 
absorbed to be able to realize the gathering of parasites and pred- 
atory animals watching him for the first signs of success on his 
part. Metaphorical fangs, claws, beaks, descend upon what he 
has uncovered, and he is lucky if even his reputation is left. 

Professional men are notoriously poor business men, and no 
one knows this so well as the business sharper who takes advan- 
tage of it. The cause is simple, no one can develop in several 
directions at once. The money shark is a specialist. The physi- 
cian too often is so deep in his studies, so wholly wrapped up in 
the welfare of his patients, that with returning health they find 
the doctor pays little attention to his recompense, and so they 
naturally try to forget it themselves, and often succeed. It re- 
quires a high type of intellect to appreciate a physician's services. 

To prevent a famous cathedral from being reproduced by its 
inventor his eyes were put out, in times when such cruelties were 
more common, but this desire to prevent what is secured from 
becoming so common that too many enjoy it is seen today in ex- 
clusive books at great expense being sold to the few, and the 
plates being destroyed to prevent other copies from being printed. 
Grand churches and other "public" buildings are empty six days 
in the week, while the poor are without shelter. 

Scullions of the wealthy destroy and throw away enough to 
feed all the famished in the city, indications of the animal selfish- 
ness and carelessness of even intelligent people, and of course 
with reverse positions the poor made rich would do the same with 
the rich who were made poor. It is simply inherited common 
animal human nature. What we grab is our own, no matter how 
we get it, or who needs it more than we do. 

There is a disposition of the successful "to pull the ladder 



380 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

up" by which they have climbed. Professors and merchants, mil- 
itary and navy alike have this feeling. The monkey in the cocoa- 
nut tree growls at intruders. 

The real conflict of capitalists is not against the poor directly, 
but between themselves, and F. S. Billings holds that the "dog- 
eat-ddg" combat between them is as fierce as it is between the 
wage-earners for bread. Mere differentiations of the game of 
grab. 

It is fortunate for the poor that the rich do grab from each 
other, for otherwise the common people would be hungry and 
naked always. In the evolution of the grab instinct the combi- 
nations for trade purposes seek profit to themselves. It is folly 
to suppose they organize to help their fellow-beings. The robber 
monstrosity, the Standard Oil trust for example, is not philan- 
thropic, but many of these combinations finally accidentally 
cheapen products against their will ; the}' would raise the price of 
everything handled if possible, but fear of competition among 
other things compels them to lower prices, except when they tem- 
porarily squeeze the public when they dare to do so by raising 
prices, which they cannot keep up, as competitors would instantly 
rush in. Murder and arson are favorite weapons of some of 
these giant corporations. The methods of the beast and the sav- 
age are used by aggregations of beasts and savages. The grab 
propensity is not hidden through robbers banding themselves to- 
gether. When these giant combines fight one another then civil- 
ization and the common people get the benefit of the contest. 



CHAPTER XL 
DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 

The new-born child has an undeveloped brain just as many 
other parts of its body are not developed ; its organs of sense 
for sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell are imperfect and not 
well attached to the brain, and the bundles of telegraph lines that 
connect the different regions of the brain in the grown person are 
altogether wanting in the immature child. Some of these bundles 
that are the most important by way of inheritance from the races 
and the animals that have preceded us begin to appear in the brain 
and spinal cord four months before birth. But in the upper and 
middle part of the brain these white bundles are not formed until 
the child is ready to be born, the nerves in the brain that pass 
between the upper part of the spinal cord, the centre for vision, 
and the centre for leg movements being the first to appear ; the 
nerve bundles that pass down the spinal cord to enable the brain 
to properly regulate the movements of the body and limbs do not 
appear until after birth ; the great mass of connecting bundles 
between the spinal cord and brain begin to develop at birth and 
continue to the third month. The front part of the brain and 
the lower portions of the middle part of the brain do not begin 
to develop until the fifth month, and then they continue to grow 
to the ninth month. This includes provision for eyesight to be 
connected with leg motions, and then the gradual development of 
other tracts for the head, arms and other parts, and then the high- 
est intellectual part of the brain behind the forehead, being the 
last to develop, is in keeping with the evolutionary history of man 
backward to his earliest animal ancestry. 

Now the ability of the new-born child to grasp a stick and 
support his own weight by holding on to it with his hands, points 
to the early construction of the nerves that pass between the hands 
and the spinal cord centres, much lower than the brain, and this 

381 



382 HE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

indicates the tree life of our ancestry, and the use of the hands 
thus early in clinging to the mother and in passing from one 
bough to the other. The feet also have some grasping ability and 
axe turned inward as are those of monkeys, and where ankles re- 
main weak and the child walks on the outer side of his foot it is 
because the later developed muscles to that part have failed to 
grow properly. And just so when different parts of the brain 
stop growing in keeping with the age of the individual then the 
child may become idiotic. 

The helplessness of the infant has its analogy in the low grade 
intelligence of early animal existence, but instincts begin in many 
mammals at birth, and the moment the bird is hatched automatic 
reflex acts are performed through such instincts, which are the 
accumulated results of more than a million years of ancestral 
learning. Little chickens just out of the shell follow the flight 
of insects and peck at food. The baby cannot hold his head up 
or guide his leg and arm motions. At first he cannot see any 
better than the youngest puppy, and in many other respects he 
is less mature than the generality of new-born animals, not wholly 
because the higher the animal the longer and more helpless is his 
infancy, but the vastly more complex anatomy of the superior 
animal requires more time and a greater range of material to per- 
fect its organs, to perform the functions inherited from a longer 
line of ancestry, who have undergone oreater changes in their 
brain development than have the lower kinds of life. Appropriate 
parts are needed to perform instinctive acts, and we must wait 
till the brain parts mature in the infant, as feathers have to grow 
on the bird's wing before it can fly. A very low instinctive reflex 
is the grasp of the nipple by the new-born, but even this can not 
be done if the child is born too soon. The earliest movements are 
kicks before birth, and later cries, sneezing, grimaces, contortions, 
sucking, and immoderate, irregular motions. Restlessness con- 
tinues throughout childhood, and involuntary squirming occurs 
when the child is curbed as during lesson learning, because as 
yet the energies are too general to be directed mainly in a few 
channels, and nerve tracts are too incomplete to allow definite 
well-regulated movements at this period. The irregularity of the 
idiot motions is explained by failure to develop the final complex 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 3S3 

brain connections that distribute impulses intelligently. When a 
chicken has its head cut off it flops about convulsively in the 
absence of its higher regulative apparatus, the brain. When 
movements become more intelligent, better adapted to definite 
purposes, then they are said to be co-ordinated, and this co-ordi- 
nation, or improvement in the way the child handles himself, 
keeps pace with the growth of the finer connections, the telegraph 
lines in the brain. The motions then tell what is taking place in 
the child. The poorly regulated movements are observed also 
in the child's first efforts to write when he keeps his tongue, feet, 
face and hands going. Adults learning to write do the same, as 
their writing centres in the brain are not well connected with mo- 
tions. 

Sneezing at birth is attributed to the cold air contact with the 
skin and sensitive nostrils ; it is a reflex instinctive expulsion of 
substances from the breathing passages. A tickle induces reflex 
attempts to escape. Darwin noted a seventh day infant bent his 
toes and drew away his foot when the sole was touched, the palm 
closed when touched and opened when the back of the hand was 
touched. Months pass before the child regulates his hand move- 
ments, showing that experience was the gradual teacher of his 
ancestry. Before five months he holds his mother's breast. 1 
Though grasping can be done in a reflex way without intention 2 
it was the seventh month before efforts were made to grasp an 
object with the hand. 

Desire and attention were expressed a few days later by his 
extending his arms, protruding his lips and looking earnestly at 
his father. In a few weeks what was purely mechanical becomes 
voluntary. As Compayre notes, the history of all the child's mo- 
tions are the same irresistible, blind impulses at first, gradually 
conscious desires, thoughtless but with an end to be attained, he 
comes to direct his motions, though ignorant of how they are 
carried on, and for that matter seldom does he ever know or care, 
however old. 

Children do not follow objects with their eyes at first ; they 

1 The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child, Gabriel Com- 
payre, tr. by Mary E. Wilson, 1896. 

2 Preyer, The Senses and the Will, p. 241. 



384 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

later learn to direct their looks and fix them upon objects and 
appreciate distances. The light pains the child's eyes, though 
nearly blind. The field and range of the vision of the new-born 
is limited and short. He does not see to the right or left, but only 
in a straight line, and not very far away. He cannot move his» 
head or eyeballs rapidly, and correct vision depends upon ability 
to oscillate the eye. The angular sensitiveness of the retina and 
visual tracts is not what it becomes later. At a short distance in 
front of him he sees the candle light held before him, but farther 
away he loses it. Every new-born child is short-sighted, myopic, 
and his ability to see farther away increases with the months 
passing. A child of two months can see a foot and a half off, 
one of three months a yard. For a few w r eeks the eyelid motions 
are neither co-ordinate nor symmetrical, one eye opens while the 
other is shut, and the eyelids do not accompany the pupil regu- 
larly in their movements, and co-ordination of the eyelids with 
eyeball movements does not exist at first. Dodging, squinting, 
from what Preyer calls the aggressive hand, does not exist during 
the first weeks. The eye motions are not united up to the third 
month. Espinas mentions a child who followed the light of a 
lamp with his eyes on the twenty-sixth day, and at two months 
directed his glance better and better, and even fixes them upon 
the eyes of the person speaking to him, instinctively, reflexly and 
not by will power. Darwin's son had not acquired the faculty of 
following an object with his eyes when rapidly waved before him 
till seven and a half months. At the twenty-ninth month Preyer 
saw a child follow the flight of a bird with his eyes, and I think 
this record is a misprint for twenty-ninth week. 

One born blind whose sight is given him by an operation said 
he saw an extended bright field where everything was dim, con- 
fused and in motion, so likely it is w T ith the first sight of the in- 
fant. Even at two or three months the child does not distinguish 
one object from another, a few bright points as lights, the reflec- 
tion from the eyes of persons or animals, bright playthings, etc., 
are seen, and then gradually new images appear. In the second 
and third month he seems to see new things, though they were 
there previously. 

The infant's color appreciation is "raw," for he is not sensible 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 385 

of shades of color. At four months a boy began to prefer bright 
red to other colors. Red is the first ray visible in the spectrum 
and the preference of savages and barbarians. 

The short-sightedness of the infant is allied to the indifference 
<n animals to objects in the extreme distance. The inability to 
fix the attention is what is found in most dogs and monkeys. 

After the color sense has come to the child then the ability to 
recognize forms develops. He greets his mother with smiles as 
he associates her with a past full of dinners, but the stranger as- 
tonishes and frightens him. Preyer says his son at two years 
recognized the photographs of familiar people, but long before 
this he knows persons apart, the face, form, stature have im- 
pressed the child. At four months Darwin found this ability to 
recognize. Tiedeman's son at the fifth month turned away from 
black clothes, at eight months this child was affectionate to those 
he knew. Cuignet's child recognized his mother and smiled at 
her, but not at others. There is a decided disposition of the infant 
at first to fear strangers and many new things, often capriciously, 
and later things and persons he once feared serve to amuse him. 

Binet found an appreciation of small differences of distances 
by comparison in a girl of two and a half years. 

Attention, curiosity, sympathy, astonishment, intellectual and 
moral instincts depend largely for their existence upon sight reg- 
istrations in the brain. 

Preyer describes the child groping, stretching out his hands 
to seize objects far out of his reach, at twenty months one wished 
to jump from a window to his father in the garden. This inabil- 
ity to judge distances is shown by the blind when given sight, 
feeling as though all objects touched their eyes. Nor can they 
tell cubes and spheres from squares and discs, the human face 
looks like a plane, though they knew how it felt. One previously 
blind girl tried to grasp an object thirty yards away. 

Taine speaks of a little girl at the third month who began to 
associate color with touch and muscular impressions of distance 
and form. It is not at the outset that the touch perceptions begin 
to join the sight perceptions. Twenty days after an operation 
the sight impressions were not yet related to touch. One picked 
up a cat to be able to tell it from a dog and said : "Well, pussy, 



386 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

henceforth I shall know yon." The child learns that the tree ap- 
pears larger as he nears it and the house looks smaller as he leaves 
it, but he learns these matters long before he can walk. 

A few hours or days he is temporarily deaf, from the absence 
of air in the ear-drum of the new-born child. The first impres- 
sions of sounds to an infant are startling and react more violently 
than sight. A loud sneeze heard for the first time makes the baby 
act like a jumping-jack. Persons who have had ear wax obstruc- 
tions to hearing removed suffer from the new loudness of all 
sounds. But as with strange sights, that at first alarmed so it is 
with sounds when they become familiar; as Darwin says, they 
finally seem to be accepted as good jokes. When a month and 
a few days old Tiedeman's son delighted in piano music. In the 
sixth week he opened his eyes wide when sung to ; in the eighth 
week he was attentive to music and laughed and smiled ; the 
thirteenth week he was quieted when he heard notes, but he liked 
noise because it was noise, and as with savages there was no ques- 
tion of taste, but if amused by all noises he was charmed by 
music, for it suggested order, regularity and beauty, which were 
to him mere exercise of nerve channels, for the time being di- 
verting his kicks, sprawls and coos. Cuignet's child at one 
month recognized the mother's voice when it could not tell people 
apart. At first it is the pitch of sound that is appreciated, while 
later it is the tone and articulation. 

After the touch sense, taste is the next earliest faculty to 
develop ; the child rejects sour milk. Preyer's son shook his head 
and closed his eyes when a new dish was offered him, his face 
expressed astonishment, and yet the food was pleasing to him, 
for he asked for it later. The sight of some dishes is repulsive 
to some children, nor is it easy to always be able to tell why this 
is so. Heredity and habit are potent in tastes. 

The new-born is indifferent to odors. Smell appears illy de- 
veloped from the very start of life, but it plays a part in prefer- 
ence of food or nurses. At the fifteenth month cologne pleased 
Preyer's son, and not before. Some children develop a most ex- 
traordinary olfactory discrimination, being able to recognize per- 
sons apart by their individual odor. As the smelling sense was 
an earlier means of searching for food and telling of an enemy's 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 3S7 

approach it would seem that this delay in its development is ano- 
malous, hut nature often abridges the tendency of structures to 
abort, and as the smelling organs have grown less important in 
man than his vision the facilities for sight are mainly attended 
to. There are, however, large bundles called the hippocampus 
major and fornix fibres in the brain which, in my opinion, for- 
merly related the eating with the smelling centers of the brain, 
but as the olfactory lobe at the brain base degenerated into a mere 
tract, with embryonal elements for the most part, the nose became 
poorly connected with the olden nerve paths in the brain, and 
these latter have a tendency to diminish, especially at the part 
called the pes hippocampi, and the hippocampus minor could be 
regarded as relating the eye registrations in the cuneus with the 
former paths which were connected with the smelling sense. The 
large size of the old paths, as compared with the smaller size of 
the new, the major w r ith the minor, could be regarded as clue to 
the millions of years in which smell guided the eating motions in 
our animal progenitors, while the acquisition of eyesight discrim- 
ination in such matters is comparatively recent, only a few hun- 
dred thousand years for instance. So the major bundles re- 
main the larger as yet in spite of their tendency to disappear, and 
often a change in the uses of a part suffices to retain it when the 
former use has ceased. 

Disagreeable touch impressions, as too tight bandaging, or 
sprinkling in baptism, are resented. The child appears to alter- 
nate pain and pleasure, but at first pain is most evident by its 
incessant cries. Preyer says that it is altogether wrong to main- 
tain that a child has no fear unless it has been taught him. It is 
native and associated with all new impressions, as wild animals 
are startled by the unknown. A simple change in costume may 
arouse fear in a young child, as when a mother put on a large hat 
her baby was greatly frightened. 

It bears upon the evolution of emotions that anger is a feeling 
that often replaces fear in a child ; at first indefinite tracts dif- 
fused the feeling of surprise in tremblings and badly regulated 
motions to escape, but with the advent of a better organized, more 
definite nervous system effort to resent the unpleasant experience 
would be suggested, and the instant the unknown becomes famil- 



3SS THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

iar there has been a change for the better, an evolutionary step, 
in the nervous system. A child of four and a half went into a 
rage over an unknown tongue his father spoke to him, the odious 
sounds at first scared and later annoyed him. Compayre holds 
that astonishment in a child is at first synonymous with fear and 
later with admiration. Surprise and fright are one and the same 
to him. At four months Darwin's son regarded all loud sounds 
as good jokes, but an unfamiliar snore frightened him. So it is 
not in all instances that when familiar with matters the infant 
changes to rage or admiration ; it depends upon associated im- 
pressions, a laugh at baby's surprise could be recalled when he 
once more heard the noise that startled him at first, and his imi- 
tative disposition causes him to laugh when the noise is repeated,, 
as he has learned its harmlessness, but things disagreeable remain 
so from the first. Darkness frightens children and sometimes 
animals. Imagination fills the night with terrors. There seems 
to be a natural repugnance for black in children, and solitude is 
usually terrible to the child. There is much explained by hered- 
ity in real dangers experienced, and the persistence of barbarous 
superstitions. Children, horses and some other animals show fear 
over movements without apparent cause, as when a newspaper 
or an umbrella is blown about. The skittish horse has a sus- 
picious qui vive fear of danger at every turn, and his later amuse- 
ment when familiar with what at first frightened him is shown 
by his play pretense of being scared. This fear of the unknown 
that causes the horse to shy at a wheelbarrow operates to drive 
the superstitious into the temple. 

Fearlessness is often spoken of as an infantile trait, but this 
is merely because danger is not recognized and there is no fore- 
sight. He does not wince on being menaced unless he has been 
struck; he knows only caresses, but he has tears for imaginary 
troubles. 

The effect of mental impressions in changing the chemical 
properties of the blood and devoured secretions is shown in the 
instance of anger converting a mother's milk into poison for its 
offspring, causing convulsions. The gluttony of the infant in- 
ducing everything to be stuck in its mouth is a consequence of all 
its nervous system being built upon mgestive desires. When the 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 389 

higher brain qualities are lost, as in the dement, these same glut- 
tonous indications appear again. Affection in a child has its ori- 
gin in the selfish recollection of personal pleasure given by the 
nurse or mother. A toy, a dog, or cat, has perhaps the same rank 
in affection as father and mother (Compayre). He also loves 
because he is loved. "It is by dint of receiving that the heart 
ends in giving." 3 

At six months Darwin's son was sad when his nurse pretended 
to cry, but not till a year old did he express love actively, as when 
his nurse returned, by embracing her. 

The laugh of a child is associated with appeased hunger or the 
expectation of that pleasure. See it chuckle impatiently in antici- 
pation, and laugh and smile at the breast, and the broad grin of 
satisfaction when gorged. It is the glorified smile of sanctity in 
its original state. The saint and baby has a belly full of pro- 
tection against want. 

At six weeks the laugh appears and the smile is a symbol of 
laughter inherited from the associated habit of enlarging the 
mouth to eat large morsels of food. 

Darwin notes that tears appear at the third or fourth month, 
but Preyer says at the twenty-third day. The "crocodile tears" 
appear directly useful in lubricating the eyes pained by sun glare 
and can be regarded as a substitute for the direct salt water bath- 
ing of the eyes by fishes. So by serviceable associated habit tears 
have come to express mental grief which at first were shed to 
ease physical pain of the eyeball dryness, and step by step ex- 
tended to other physical pains, and finally to all kinds of pain 
whatever. 

The first steering is physical in the infant, and later come the 
emotions of fear, anger, surprise, chagrin, and finally moral grief. 
In man tears often are suppressed in physical pain and appear 
only as an expression of moral grief. There are also emotional 
tears of joy, contentment, satisfaction, showing that the lachrymal 
gland must be surcharged by a rush of blood to its vicinity by 
associated action of all emotional influences. 

Anger turns the baby's face red and fright may pale it, but 
there is variability in blushing. Some adults either pale or blush 

3 Guyau, Education et heredite, p. 63. 



390 THE EVOLUTION OF MAX AND HIS MIND. 

under emotional influence. Blushes are seldom precocious, and 
thus special vaso-motor action appears with the later mental devel- 
opment. 

The child expresses with his physiognomy, humility or cour- 
age, weakness or strength, surprise, astonishment, admiration and 
the pout of bad humor, and numerous evidences of pleasure or 
pain. 

"Memory does not appear until the third year, according to 
some.'' 4 Others say the fourth or fifth year, but Emile Rousseau 5 
says : "Although memory and reasoning are two essentially dif- 
ferent faculties still one does not really develop without the other. 
Before the age of reason the child does not develop ideas, but 
images." 

"The memory of ideas, the adult memory, which is capable 
of following and recognizing all the threads of a long reason- 
ing, is absent in the young child, but children remember sounds, 
forms, sensations, everything they perceive and feel, abstract 
ideas not being yet within their reach.'' 

The adult does not remember the first years of his life, but 
certainly the infant has memory, only it develops into a different 
sort from that of the adult, who remembers his memories back 
to certain periods, and beyond that, except on extraordinary oc- 
casions, fails to do so. At times very startling impressions may 
be recalled from an earlier date than five, four or even three years 
of age." Earlier recollections depend on precocity, the character 
of the incidents witnessed, their novelty or importance, a catas- 
trophe, misfortune, fall, while ordinary events of monotonous 
life will be forgotten" (Compayre). Consciousness ceases to be 
concerned in fully adjusted monotonous matters, routine events 
of infancy, though they leave their impress upon the brain. Ex- 
ceptional incidents of shock or blood supply changes may return 
forgotten events to consciousness, however. 

Every new word the child learns is an act of memory. A 
seventeen months' child recalled its nurse's face after her absence 
of six days (Preyer), but at seven months he did not know her 

4 Madame Campan. De L'Education, Lib. II, Ch. I. 

5 Book II. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 391 

after four weeks' absence. Perez cites a child a year old recalling 
a servant after a month's absence. 

So the child does have memory from its birth, but this mem- 
ory is fragile and easily obliterated. Continued repetition of 
impressions is necessary to fix events in the mind, and even 
these in infancy may sink into association with automatic per- 
formances and fade from consciousness largely. 

A child mentioned by Liebnitz, who became blind at three 
years, retained no sight recollection. Preyer tells of a little girl 
who. at seven years, lost her eyesight and regained it at seventeen 
years of age. but had to learn anew how to name colors, distances 
and dimensions. 

The child hears his mother's tongue constantly, the same 
words repeated, and he recognizes objects and persons because 
he sees them every day, and when children are often reminded of 
them they fancy that they remember earlier events when in reality 
it is only the mention of these earlier events that they recall. The 
child confuses past and present ; an hour and a week ago are 
about the same to him. 

By a return to the original scenes of childhood after many 
years events may be vividly recalled that were not known to be 
in the memory at all. Old dormant impressions are revived. A 
child of four years fractured his skull, says Abercrombie, and 
did not recall it till fifteen, when he had a delirious fever, and 
then spoke of ail the details of the operation on his skull. 

Compayre and other psychologists speak of hereditary mem- 
ory as an instinct determined by ancestral experiences. Eggar 
says: "Memory is produced at the earliest age for acts that are 
frequently repeated ; it is slower in the case of accidental acts. 
At fifteen months a child goes to a toy accidentally fallen under a 
chair ; before this he could not have done so. At six months a 
child burns his hand on a hot plate and afterwards avoids the 
plates. In lactation, play and in walking memory is evident. 
Memory has been represented as a form of habit and instinct may 
be defined as a hereditary memory, an impersonal habit. "If 
words are necessary to ideas they are to the remembrance of par- 
ticular perception, and to cause them to remain." 1 '' The uncertain 

6 Compavre. p. 227. 



392 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

state of the memory during the first month is laid to the absence 
of language, but the brain structure itself is more at fault. Be- 
fore two< years the baby has precise remembrance of familiar toys, 
whippings, candy, falls, a kitten, caresses, kisses, etc. 7 "The 
child's mind is like a sponge, always thirsty." 8 One has more 
power of attention at fifteen than at ten, more at ten than at five, 
and so age improves one of the conditions of remembrance. The 
child's attention is short, but is always alert, ready and on the 
watch for new impressions. 

So the child babbles of unimportant matters ; he sees all and 
tells all. He forgets nothing recently learned or that affects him 
keenly. After the fourth or fifth year recollections become very 
durable and are better as we grow older. The child's organs of 
retentiveness are not stable till the fourth or fifth year ; he does 
not see or hear, or recognize stably till the fourth year or there- 
abouts, hence after this, when the brain is more retentive, when 
the power to retain and recall is developed, recollections are more 
accessible, although impressions made at the first period are latent 
in the mind, for the fact that they are sometimes unexpectedly 
recalled shows that consciousness may be excited to recalll these 
dormant spots in recollection. It may indeed be questioned if 
anything is ever really obliterated from the mind, when states 
of consciousness may recall things supposed to be forgotten, and 
dreams may be said to sometimes present ancestral memories 
mixed with the acquired in a jumbled way. Association causes 
"a bit of song our mothers used to sing, or a bit of landscape 
lighted up by our childhood sun to reappear." The recollections 
of childhood are the last to disappear in mental disease. Memory 
is lost in the reverse chronological order of its acquisition. In 
story-telling the child lays stress on the exact words and wants 
no change ; later he interpolates and improves and changes by his 
imagination being at w r ork. An imbecile has to go back to Mon- 
day in naming days of the week, and cannot begin with Thursday 
or some other day. 

Lubbock found a difference in memory between bees in a hive 
by testing individuals as to their recollection of newly-made en- 

7 Nicolay, Les Enfants mal eleves, p. 318. 
s G. Dros, L'Enfant. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 393 

trances to the hive. Certain bees never could adapt themselves 
to the changed door; there seemed to be a lack of adjustability 
to new conditions of memory, the old association fastening them 
to old performances. 

Memories are more numerous than the senses, for one recalls 
forms and may still be a little sensitive to colors. Memory cor- 
responds to each of the five senses and also to different operations 
of the mind, and there are great irregularities in memory. Suc- 
cessive perceptions acquire value only when memory preserves 
them, and when it renders possible comparisons between new 
perceptions that follow. Compayre does not think that the per- 
ception constitutes an intelligent act in the highest sense. Per- 
ception forced upon the mind does not show the activity of the 
brain. It is another matter when by means of memory a com- 
parison can be made between a past and a present perception. 
Judgment by comparison continually increased forms the human 
mind. 

Perception, memory and imagination are three distinct terms, 
three successive and correlative stages of intellectual development. 
The child remembers only what he perceives. Imagination pre- 
supposes memory. Images are of two kinds — the exact and inex- 
act — and memory corresponds to them. To have combination 
invention of active imagination it is necessary to have a large 
number of sensible representations. 

A child sees snow for the first time, though his ancestry have 
perhaps also seen it for millions of years before, and he may have 
also seen mountains, but not mountains of snow, yet his imagi- 
nation may join the two. But in this case also ancestral memory 
may play a part, for mountains of snow have undoubtedly been 
seen by many of our progenitors. It suggests that if recent expe- 
riences cohere with the ancestral in memory then the imagina- 
tion would be more impressed in such cases. You cannot imag- 
ine what you have not some basis for in experience. In a picture 
a child will recognize details as a man, a house, etc., but not the 
landscape, though he may be conscious of its familiarity to him ; 
he is not yet able to give expression to his impressions of it. 
The imagination runs riot in dreams, and it is supposable that 
dreaming furthers imagination in the child, the process being 



394 THE EVOLUTION OF MAX AND HIS MIND. 

dependent upon changes in blood supply to the brain. Taine re- 
marks : 9 "The mental state of little children is in many respects 
that of primitive peoples in the mythological and poetic period. 
The child would create a new mythology if left alone. His touch- 
ing faith in accepting your lying fables, and his weaving them 
into the fabric of his own fancies is proof of his natural disposi- 
tion. The child invests inanimate objects with life and feeling 
and personifies them ; he makes gods of them sometimes, just as 
he will humanize animals and be a prey to Aesop's fables, 'The 
rainbow is asleep,' 'the moon is broken,' 'the moon is mended/ 
'the sun has gone to bed; 'the bent pin is lame,' 'tomorrow he will 
get up and eat a piece of bread and butter,' are all childish anthro- 
pomorphisms identical with savage ideas. He talks to his doll, he 
says his dream is naughty, he asks 'what does the rabbit say/ 
and 'what does the big tree say?'" 

George Sand contests Rousseau's idea of explaining things to 
children. She would preserve the marvelous in the child. 
Some teachers adhere to the idea that the primitive dispositions 
should be catered to, and in an extreme view of this, decency, man- 
ners, behavior should be postponed indefinitely. In my opinion 
the ultra-animal is difficult enough to improve upon, and the 
sooner we begin to try to do so the better it will be for the future 
of the child. This can be practiced reasonably, and when a child 
becomes capable of proper instruction he should be taught to 
abandon his cruelty, his intense selfishness, his general savagery. 
To pander to them when he is capable of being improved is to 
do him a disservice. One mistaken educator would encourage 
slang and roughness in children because such things are natural. 
He mistakes these things as stepping stones to better language 
and behavior, and might as well insist upon fingers being used at 
meals and fighting over food at the table as our progenitors did. 

To take the marvelous out of a child is said to go against 
his nature, but is it useful to a child to be loaded with lies that 
frighten him through life and make him a prey to humbugs and 
exploiters of ignorance? Better curb too great indulgence in 
imagination as feverish, as animal. 

9 Revue Philosophique. 1876. Lib. I, p. 14. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 395 

Savages dream of a paradise where all their bows and arrows 
and boats will be present. 

The child may be allowed to delight in fancies and at the same 
time be taught not to believe in them. He can have the operation 
of his mind explained to him without allowing it to lead him 
astray. It is not necessary for adults to believe in poetic fancies, 
and the child knows that playing is not real. Imagination is one 
thing and belief is another. The child can play that his toys are 
alive without being lied to that it is really so. He loves to pre- 
tend that he is deceiving himself, and this is true of many adults. 
"Pretty" means a new pleasure to the child, and those who con- 
tribute to the child's pleasures are the most loved and hence the 
selfish basis of affection. 

Consciousness develops first for impressions. Lastly in the 
adult comes the memory of groups of events and of the individual 
as the one to whom these events occurred, the infant does not 
know himself as a unit, nor can he tell his shoe from his foot, as 
part of his anatomy. Consciousness is thus resolvable, so far as 
the adult is concerned, into a memory of memories. The impres- 
sions made upon us constitute the first ground for consciousness, 
disconnected, unassociated, and finally the recollection that the 
recollections occurred, the memory of the memories is another 
kind of consciousness. 

In attention the eye is fixed, the motions are lessened, other 
functions are checked, the aim is centralized. It is an expres- 
sion of the desire to know more, curiosity, inquiry, placing the 
person under the best conditions to learn, it is listening, looking 
intently, or the other senses may be made equally attentive ; you 
can taste, touch or smell attentively. 

Association of ideas merely recalls memories, and education in 
facts shows how difficult it is to arouse proper associations. The 
infant finally learns that water wets, the sun dries. It is merely 
exercising a memory of consecutively related matters, or simul- 
taneous events, a picture presented to the mind is recalled. Dreams 
faultily relate these impressions, often inverting sequences or 
causes and effects. 

Colored hearing and seeing colors for certain numbers or 
words, could be due to vascular association. These colors change 



396 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

with age. The color is simultaneously excited in the brain when 
the figures or words occur, probably as survivals of some early 
operation of fancy, or as an association. 

The questions of children show the dawn of reason. ''Has 
the moon wings?" "Where do all the days go?" The incessant 
whine of "Why?" is familiar to parents, or its equivalent, "What 
for?" 

Children are very susceptible to precedent, custom and gen- 
eral rule. Permission makes a thing right with them. The child 
tries to tuck away isolated facts into some generalization, after the 
ability to generalize has appeared. He sees some things made, 
and wants to know who* made trees, who> made God, and so on. 

A child's logic is merciless and worth observing, in contrast 
with many of the adult's tendencies to shirk and muddle thought. 

The anthropomorphic idea is strong in children. The child 
says the tree is to make the wind blow, and savages entertain this 
idea, reversing cause and effect, a failure, also, of the highest 
intellects where unfamiliar matters are to be judged. 

"Why don't God kill the devil?" and "Why can't we see two 
things with two eyes?" the child asks. Also, "If I had gone up- 
stairs, could God make it that I hadn't ?" Theologians, according 
to Erasmus, 10 debated over "Can God make a thing done not to 
have been done?" 

The child begins with ideas of anthropomorphism and passes 
to second-hand, adopted ideas of monotheism. 

There is a mental disorder known as Grubelsucht, or doubting 
insanity, which leaves the adult mind in some such puzzling state. 
The Grubelsucht, why is a glass a glass, etc., is thus reversionary, 
and a child shows the savage early type of brain working to which 
the person with doubt affliction is atavistic. 

A child's questions may be symptoms of peevishness and irri- 
tability, to be cuied by healthy distraction, or a romp, says Perez 

The savage and child readiness to accept dreams as real, or as 
having significance, and its confusion of dreams with realities, 
resembles also the lunatic's inability to correct illusions and hallu- 
cinations. Old people are supposed to become little again by 
some children. "When I get big and you are little, T will whip 

10 Froude, Letters of Erasmus, Lecture VII. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 397 

you '" This can be from a mental balancing of the see-saw of 
lit'.' by the child, who thinks that if one grows big the big ones 
should grow liUle. 

A child gives you his shoe when you ask for it, and if you tell 
him to give you his foot the baby will take his foot in his hand 
to give it to you, as he does not yet realize his personal make-up 
as consolidated. He regards his foot as a separate toy, and does 
not know that he can move it without holding it in his hands, 
though he sees it moving about. He treats his toes as toys, and 
puts them in his mouth. His will is not within his recollection, 
and he does not know yet what he can do with his limbs, or how 
he can do it. At first the child does not recognize his own image 
in the mirror, but finally, by noting agreements of the image with 
his hand and other movements, he infers that the image is his. 
Preyer's boy did this by the twenty-first month, and knew his 
mother in the glass by the sixtieth week. The linguistic efforts 
of a child resemble those of savages, and they adopt hieroglyphic 
pictures likewise. The child does not separate in imagination 
what he sees from what he has seen, or resolve what he is able 
to see at one time ; for he draws three sides of a house as in view 
at one instant. 

Children have vague ideas of time. They talk of days as 
though they were things, as moving things. "Where is yesterday 
gone to?"' "Where will tomorrow come from?" 

The child reduces all abstractions to concrete, living realities, 
and it is likely that abstractions in the adult are merely concrete 
substitutions. An hour is an eternity at school. Infants' first 
words are recognition signs, like "da," as it points to the object, 
just as monkeys could announce things in the distance by looks 
and exclamations. "Atta," all gone, says Preyer's little boy, to 
indicate an empty glass, or that the light is out, or the departure 
of a thing, so it comprehends situations as a movement. Motion 
with children and primitive people is mixed up with the mover, 
and- Max Miiller notes this early confusion in language of the 
mover and moved as one idea. Another child extended its ter- 
minal exclamation to the ending of music, the closing of a drawer, 
the dropping of something, and so on. 



39$ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Minto 11 tells of a child who called his nurse mambro, and then 
gave the same name to her sewing machine (probably in a pos- 
sessive sense) ; then, by analogy to a hand organ, and later by 
association of hand organ with monkey, he called his rubber mon- 
key mambro, all within two years, and something of the flux of 
early languages can be conceived in this. Too little and too much 
can be confused, also yesterday and tomorrow, unsuitable in quan- 
tity in one case and time not present in the other. Abstract rela- 
tions are acquired slowly. Learn and teach call up pictures of 
acts. Buying is imaged as over the counter. A parasol blown 
about was a "windy parasol," and a stone that made her hand 
sore was a very "sore stone." The child extends a recognition 
sign of one object to another object through some fancied, often 
not real, resemblance; the crackling of fire is called ''barking" in 
a childish classification. Dipping bread in gravy is "bath." Door 
was anything that stopped an exit, as a cork, and the table to his 
high chair. The tendency is thus to express the abstract by a 
concretism ; boy and little is sometimes mamma and baby, a 
small coin is a baby dollar. Romaine's daughter pointed out the 
sheep in a picture as "mamma ba" and "ilda ba/' "too big" is too 
difficult. Darwin's child used quack for duck (association ono- 
matopoeia), then extended this to water and to other fluids, then 
used the word for all birds and insects ; resemblances and asso- 
ciation with them and generalization form the concrete. The 
child sees things together and thinks that they are one thing; so 
does the savage. Tribes having no abstract signs use metaphors 
as the child does, and our language has traces of this in such 
words as imbecile, which was weak, originally meaning leaning 
on a staff. "Tell wind" was a w r eather vane. 

Savages shape new names out of familiar ones, the Aztecs 
called a boat a water house. Sentences are founded on the basis 
of early savage construction. "Teacher I beat, deceive, scold, 
no, I love honor, yes," are deaf-mute and child expressions. Pic- 
tures of acts joined to negatives, shakes, and positive to nods of 
head (acts). Fear, pleasure, pain, discontent and also content, 
misery, gladness, are clearly expressed by the child as bodily 
comfort and discomfort. From the scream to the whine and 

11 Logic University Extension Manual, pp. 88-94. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 399 

whimper, or laugh and smile. Fear is shown by hiding the face, 
grave looks, tremblings. Suddenness and volume of sound may 
frighten at first, and children may cry at first hearing a piano. 
Animals are feared when first seen. What frightened one child 
may delight another at about the same age. The child indulges 
in angry outbursts when its raw animal desires are opposed. Hit- 
ting out right and left, smashing, destructive, howling like the 
savage it is, and the madman it may become. Preyer noticed 
these things in the 17th month. At two years Darwin's boy 
threw things at those who opposed him. A child of four would 
bang his chair or his toys, sometimes biting and threatening them. 
A child becomes angry, resentful and miserable if another child 
gets something he wants, but the imposition of authority provokes 
these storms most. The child's self, its appetite and satisfactions, 
are the centers of its existence, boys more so than girls, and some- 
times there is an atrophy of jealousy in the more gentle and 
affectionate. He enjoys release from restraint, as : "I have had 
a nice time ; mamma is sick abed." Want of sympathy of chil- 
dren is caused by absence of experience or realization of others' 
suffering. Teasing and cruelty are inherent. Children are fond 
of what they can boss or tyrannize over — cats, dogs, chickens, or 
each other. These pander to their feeling of self-importance. 
Children secrete things, adopt ruses, or act lies. They flatter and 
love to escape punishment, or to get what they want. Vanity is 
vast in children. Child morality is inconsistent and wanting in 
intensity. It is half formed and some traits tend to choke the 
others. Education alone organizes, completes and regulates the 
propensities. 

The cruelty of children is that of savages, and the vivid 
imaginations of youngsters is exactly that of the early ages, when 
boastfulness and excessive vanity abounded, when fairy tales were 
believed in by adults, and ghost stories frightened entire villages, 
and rank superstition controlled entire nations. The disposition 
to lie is an innate instinct of the child, and represents the age that 
still prevails among Oriental people when and with whom the 
advantages of telling the truth have not been learned. Every 
child is a natural born thief, he cannot understand why he should 
not take anything he sees or wants, but realizes that he must not 



400 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

be caught stealing, and these propensities vary in degrees both 
among children and races. For example, one child or one race 
may be disposed to lie, but not inclined very much to steal ; the 
propensity to cruelty, to murder, may also be similarly developed 
where truthfulness and respect for the rights of others may exist. 
This shows that what are usually grouped under the head of vir- 
tues may be wholly separate matters of expediency. One child 
may be cruel, but not mean in other respects ; another may lie 
and not be cruel, or may not steal ; one may be naturally indis- 
posed to any of these propensities, while a defective may combine 
all the shortcomings of a remote ancestry, above whose mental 
status he has failed to develop. The mischievousness of the 
young resembles that of the monkeys, and their destructiveness is 
also that of monkeys and some madmen. The emotionalism of a 
child and undue response to slight causes are like those of our 
remote ancestry, a survival of which can be observed in camp 
meetings and among untrained people generally. The love of 
jingle and rhyme, mere sound without sense, is an infantile and 
barbarous inclination. Among children of all races and negro 
adults there is admiration for resounding words and mystery, and 
the meaning of the words or the reasonableness of the mystery 
appear to be of no consequence. The curiosity of the child is of 
a low animal nature which contents itself with mere surprise, and 
seldom goes further than a very superficial inquiry into causes, 
or is satisfied with very shallow explanations. The imitative ten- 
dency of the child is seen in games in some of which the manners 
and customs of long-forgotten people have been preserved ; for 
example, counting out games are handed down from the days of 
human sacrifice, when the priests selected those who were to be 
killed, and the game of tag has come down from mimicry of the 
capture of prisoners, the tag being a symbol to indicate the one 
who was to be killed or to be taken prisoner. Children, savages 
and degenerates give nicknames and incline to tattooing the skin. 
The ability to climb trees, romp, caper and squabble is the child's 
inheritance from its monkey-like ancestry, and the liking to dig 
caves and hide in them, to be able to rush out and surprise the 
helpless, to gather plunder in them, and talk over plans of con- 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MINI). 401 

quest, go back to troglodyte days, when stone-age men often lived 
in natural cavities in the earth. 

Cultivated childhood often fails to show some of the early 
aboriginal traits so well, because they are modified and abridged. 
Cope's law of acceleration comes in to make the civilized young- 
ster pass through his ultra-animal and savage days quicker than 
was the case with previous generations. But compare children of 
the purlieus, with their ferocity, quick instincts and ape-like man- 
ners, nearlv as bad as those of the children of savages who should 
be even more ape-like than the civilized children, though savages 
menace their offspring so much as to intensify the natural fear 
transmitted by animal ancestry, and the majority of savages are 
cowardly in some respects, particularly in the dark, notwithstand- 
ing romances to the contrary. Youthful embezzlers of about 
nineteen and under are frequent. At this time reason is not 
strongly enough developed to resist temptation. It is difficult to 
apply the experience of others, but it is best to be lenient and to 
instruct children against such dangers. Alan being by nature a 
thief, it is not till riper years that he can steal with judgment and 
on a large scale. The youngster has not learned full expediency 
nor the difference between petty thefts and syndicate robbery on 
a vast scale. The acquisition of a broader intelligence enables 
him to steal according to the rules of the game as played in civil- 
ized communities. A much broader intellect teaches him to de- 
spise theft, even of the safer and greater kind. 

W. T. Ham 12 says : "The orphaned and outcast child be- 
comes precociously world wise. But the school can scarcely re- 
claim the gamin from the streets of Paris or Xew York. He has 
become as cunning and self-helpful as the water rat, but not in 
ethical or spiritual methods. He should have been held back 
from the bitter lessons of life by the shielding hand of the family. 
He would then have become a positive influence for civilization in 
its height and depth. As a gamin he can live a life only a little 
above that of the water rat, and is fitted only to feed the fires 
of revolution." Victor Hugo, in Les Miserables, gives a picture 
of the gamin's life, and show's his genesis through neglect of 
family care in infancy. Little Garroche and his two brothers, a 

12 Psychologic Foundations of Education, p. 144. 



402 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

solemn and pathetic history! Undisciplined youngsters are apt 
to be brutal, and later the world has to kick them into shape, 
which it does in the most vigorous way. Parents who indulge 
and spoil their children, and who are too tender with them to re- 
prove or punish them for bad behavior, allow their offspring to 
develop their native animality and savagery, and this results in 
greater suffering to the indulged child, because the world is sure 
to heap up abuse, corporeal and mental, which the parents could 
have averted by enlightened correction. Children feel happier 
when controlled and regulated, and they admit it, whereas ab- 
sence of control makes them miserable and causes them to hate 
themslves and all about them. Some parents regard their chil- 
dren as too good to punish, and wonder finally that these "perfect 
ones" should develop into beasts. 

Intractable children refuse to take the advice of parents, but 
later, when the results of their disobedience appear, they willingly 
permit the parents to bear the consequences. Spencer, in his 
"Education," points out the necessity of having children experi- 
ence the effects of their offenses, as where a toy is replaced when 
destroyed, or where the father comes to the financial rescue of a 
spendthrift son, the incentives to carefulness and thrift are absent. 

The native selfishness of indulged children crops out disa- 
greeably often in the best of them, as where they have been 
shielded and provided for carefully, and they may be fairly re- 
spectful in return, but when parents become dependent on the 
children the latter often grow abusive, and have been known to 
turn their parents into the street. 

The order in which mental traits develop from childhood to 
age are : Perception, memory, imagination, emotionalism, imper- 
fect reasoning, better reasoning, less emotionalism, and the moral 
traits are last. As evidence of self-consciousness being slow to 
appear, Preyer's infant bit his own arm, though not recognizing it 
as part of himself. But the child is a born diplomat often, as in 
the combination of a large and small apple and a little boy, who 
says to a little girl : "Are you greedy?" "No." "Then you can 
have the first choice." The trickiness, cunning, the ability to 
conspire, scheme, swindle, are not at all exalted faculties, for the 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIND. 403 

youngest child and the meanest savage have all these traits inborn 
and ready to exercise. • 

Jules Simon says that "the nation with the best schools is the 
first nation in the world," but pedagogy has a long road before it 
will evolve to an application of Spencer's and Schopenhauer's 
conceptions of methods of instruction. Spencer urges the ac- 
quirement of learning that is most directly helpful in getting a 
living, and postponing the ornamental studies till later years. 
Schopenhauer divides studies into the direct, or natural, with ob- 
ject lessons, and the artificial, through books, which impart gen- 
eral ideas before concrete facts are sufficiently accumulated and 
memorized. The youth is crammed with mistaken general no- 
tions, which he finds harmful more than helpful when he tries to 
apply them after leaving school, through not being taught to think 
for himself. To acquire a knowledge of the world, Schopenhauer 
considers as the aim of all education, and he lays stress upon be- 
ginning this knowledge at the right end, that observatiom should 
precede general ideas and that narrow ideas should precede those 
of a wide range. But, as Huxley says, education begins in the 
cradle and through every day of life, and if a person did not 
acquire more education out of school than in it, he would be 
unable to cross a street without being run over. One of the most 
important items of pernicious educational influence Schopen- 
hauer 13 dilates on is the average novel. In learning the ways of 
the world which are so important for the youth to know, "the dif- 
ficulty is doubled by novels which represent a state of things in 
life and the world, such as in fact does not exist. Youth is credu- 
lous and accepts those views of life which then become part and 
parcel of the mind ; so that instead of a merely negative condition 
of ignorance, you have positive error, a whole tissue of false 
notions to start with, and at a later date these actually spoil the 
schooling of experience and put a wrong construction on the les- 
sons it teaches. If before this the youth had no light at all to 
guide him, he is now misled by a will-o'-the-wisp ; still more 
often is this the case with the girl. They have both had a false 
view of life foisted on them by reading novels, and expectations 
have been aroused that never can be fulfilled. This generally 

13 Studies in Pessimism, Education. 



404 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

exercises a baneful influence on their whole life. In this respect 
those whose youth has allowed them no time or opportunity for 
reading- novels, those who work with their hands, and the like, are 
in a position of decided advantage." 

If what is false in novels were explained to children it might 
answer to let them read anything, but where it is possible to select 
their reading it is far best to direct their ideas wholesomely and 
healthfully, by proper books. 

The writing's of Charles Reade, Dickens, W. Clarke Russell 
direct attention to necessary reforms in institutions and in society 
generally. Incidentally people acquire reform information reluc- 
tantly, they do *not like to' hear of disagreeable matters, such as 
cruelties, demagoguism and official rascality. When Dickens and 
others teach such things the world is the gainer, but it has to be 
amused into a knowledge of the ills of the world and taught as 
kindergarten children through interesting and not over-exerting 
attention. Direct statements of reform matters, of necessity, 
would not be read or understood. Then the ''novel with a pur- 
pose" must be skillfully disguised as such to be read at all. Peo- 
ple take alarm at the idea of being instructed by stealth, and as a 
rule the "novel with a purpose" has to be written by a master 
hand to be tolerated, and, unfortunately, the bulk of such novels 
are written by uninformed persons, and the purpose itself is too 
frequently bigotry or cant. Mark Twain will, in all future ages, 
be recognized as one who educated his readers to important, yes, 
vital, matters, while amusing them. There is no more potent 
argument than good-natured ridicule. The pathos of his Joan of 
Arc, his Gilded Age and Prince and Pauper affects all who read 
those works. Innocents Abroad has brushed away the cobwebs 
of superstition from legions of brains, and in many such ways 
this genial author has helped his fellow-man and the world is the 
better for his having lived. This mention is quite appropriate to 
a chapter on Development of the Brain. 



CHAPTER XII. 
EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 

Some savages found a chronometer and loyally gave it to 
their chief, who consulted his priest as to its nature. The tick- 
ing and movements warranted the holy man in the belief that it 
lived ; hence the watch must have been made by the Great Spirit. 

But it was noticed that the hands revolved in time with the 
sun's path in the sky. A speculative fellow suggested the pos- 
sibility of the wheel motions being the cause of this and it became 
necessary to behead him to prevent the spread of such hetero- 
doxy, for religious authority had started the legend that the 
spirit of the watch was sufficient to cause all it was seen and 
heard to do. Someway the idea was not killed, if the man had 
been, and soon the priests assented to the dead man's claim, and 
it became a superstition to think otherwise ; thus illustrating that 
'''religion is superstition in fashion, and superstition is religion 
out of fashion." 

Another had the hardihood of a Harvey in declaring that the 
balance wheel and hair spring moved the wheels. A religious 
war was suppressed by the prompt cremation of this pundit, and 
later allegations of the kind were argued by feeding the allegator 
to the alligators, by imprisonment, or by ostracism. 

Finally the main spring was suggested as the originator of the 
watch spirit ; but the triumphant query of the priests was : "What 
is the force that moves the main spring?" When the watch ran 
down it was said to have died, and the spiritites jeered at the 
dissectors who tried to demonstrate the main spring sufficiency. 
Granting that the force did lie in that part, how can you expect 
to catch the mind, the soul that has gone from it? Thereafter 
when a dusky thinker tried to demonstrate to his brother savages 

405 



406 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

the nature of tension, by holding clown a bough and allowing it 
to spring back, some complained that thinking made the head 
ache, others that the comparison was sacrilegious, and still others 
that this sort of nonsense did not gain them food and it was best 
to keep out of scrapes by deferring to kingly and priestly author- 
ity — the safe position of mediocrity. 

The watch is man, its ticks his heart beats ; and from prehis- 
toric times the contest over his nature has been as to what he was, 
his whence and whither. That his muscles by contracting moved 
the bones was damnable heresy ; that the blood circulated, that 
the nerves controlled the muscles were assertions offensive to 
religion and "common sense." 

Ignorance imprisoned Galileo and Roger Bacon, harassed 
Copernicus, burned Giordano Bruno and Servetus and made 
hypocrites of Kepler and Tycho Brahe for their mechanical ideas 
of nature. Knowledge has wrested the faggot and torch from 
Ignorance, but he and his offspring, Superstition, still live, and 
whosoever dares to think for himself finds their power abound- 
ing in society, in the church, and among lawmakers and law 
administrators. 

That man should be studied objectively as we would a beetle, 
a tree or a watch startles us when the suggestion is first heard, 
for in our conceit, dating everything to and from ourselves, 
wrapped in our savage egotism, we can conceive of nothing 
greater than man and must needs build an anthropomorphic 
deity ; we build God in our own image and imagine him a Big' 
Man. 

The olden metaphysical, essentially the theological, method 
of studying mind wholly ignored the body, scoffed at the possi- 
bility of brain having anything to do with thought, reason, feel- 
ing, sensation, etc. That there was such a thing as an orderly, 
decent law in nature was a conception of very slow growth in the 
evolution of thought. Everything was supposed to be under the 
direct control of a capricious higher power. Step by step the 
mechanical laws that controlled the stars, the planets, the earth, 
were established, but plants, animals and man were separated 
off, as under special laws, and this is the first phase of dualism ; 
two methods of control ; direct from God for the animate, indirect 



EVOLUTION OF THE HRAIN. 407 

through nature For the inanimate. Plants and animals were 
successively wrested from the direct control dogma, but man 

himself was held to be exempt from natural laws until his make- 
up was carefully examined, and now we find that while his gen- 
eral anatomy is conceded to be similar to that of the beasts; his 
muscles, bones, blood vessels and tissues generally, the theologic- 
ally biased entrenched themselves behind superficial differences 
between the appearances of the brain of man and that of animals. 

In vain has it been demonstrated that there is not a single 
feature in the human brain that may not be shown to exist in the 
brains of apes — dualists will not concede the possibility of ana- 
tomical resemblances affecting their position where previously 
they defied production of the proof of such resemblances. 

The olden philosophers adopted the introspective or subjective 
method of mental study. Practically they shut their eyes, put 
cotton in their ears and endeavored -to think out the nature of 
mind, and their ramblings are worthy of their methods. 

The physiological or objective study gave most promise early 
in this century and David Hartley, a disciple of Locke, was one 
of the ablest of the physiological pioneers in the realms of sensa- 
tion and mind. Bain, Herbert Spencer and Wundt are the most 
notable of our day. 

Nature is the only thing worth studying for the simple reason 
that there is nothing but nature in the universe. By the merest 
glance at the habits of lower animals man is enabled to see his 
own instincts and even the workings of his intellect in their 
simplest expression. Man loves, hates, grieves, enjoys. So does 
the dog. Every animal, including man, moves about in search of 
food, grows and may propagate his kind. The mind is the sensory 
part of psychic and physical nature, the motor part of mind, and 
the unconscious factors are customarily neglected in regarding 
what is commonly called the mind. 

A good crus is necessary to a good brain, so the motor part 
is essential to intelligence and large crura are evidences of a 
good cerebral output ; that is, the individual has extra means of 
exploding his impressions. 

Savage 1 says that "as long as the mind is supposed to be 

1 On Insanity, p. 1. 



408 the evolution of man and his mind. 

located in the skull we shall make little progress; we must be 
more general in our pathology if we are to understand our sub- 
ject." 

Not only is there a relationship between all that is done by 
the body and mind of man and other animals, and the behavior 
of chemical elements, but the former depends upon the latter, and 
is merely a different expression of the same thing. We think and 
move about because nitrogen tends to escape from molecular 
combinations, and oxygen, on the contrary, seeks to unite with 
them ; and, for similar reasons, we are born, eat, grow, reproduce 
and die. Because of the disposition like and unlike elementary 
atoms have to unite to form molecules we hunger and love — the 
two feelings that control the world, as Schiller poetically affirms. 
An application of chemistry can even explain why one of these 
feelings may sacrifice the other. 

The affinity of atoms for one another may be taken as the 
cause of hunger ; the higher affections may be shown to have 
sprung from hunger by positive illustrations ; and, finally, it can 
be shown that the insane often merge every higher desire into 
acquisitiveness, or a beastly food hunger ; or that by mind degen- 
eration atavism, or its failure to develop, in certain respects, be- 
yond savagery, every regard for virtue, honor, love, even self- 
respect, may be lost in the craving for money, which represents 
the means of animal gratification. 

Nor is this knowledge useless, for it bids you lift yourself 
above bartering the best part of you, sentiment and honor, for a 
price. It tells you that you may pay too dearly for peace and 
comfort by insuring for yourself and progeny moral death. From 
these and similar considerations we may conceive cf the founda- 
tion and some of the superstructure of a practical psychology 
based upon chemistry. 

A teacher of science, with chemistry and physics as argu- 
ments, cannot appeal to the metaphysicians nor the theologians 
who are usually unprovided with elementary knowledge of mun- 
dane things. But they will deny that it is necessary to know 
chemistry or natural science to deal with theology or meta- 
physics. True enough, but as the natural sciences now include 
not onlv what concerns man but his mind and social relations, it 



EVOLUTION OK THE BRAIN. 409 

follows that the theologian and metaphysician never can, as such, 
fathom psychology and that their methods cannot deal with the 
mind. 

If they treat of subjective phenomena they are in the plight 
of a clock that would call the jars of its cog wheels, spirit, mind, 
thought. If objective matters are considered by them, their 
methods are those of the savage who studies the wheezes, puffs, 
snorts, whistlings, rattle, groan of a locomotive, observes its 
wheels revolve, its surprising speed, and, content with knowing 
what it does, is incapable of understanding the how and why, 
because not accustomed to analyze machinery or comprehend its 
principles. The savage assigns a spirit to the engine, as the 
dualist does to man, and both are satisfied that all things are 
thus explained. It seems astonishing the belief could survive to- 
day that mind exists independent of its organ, the brain, or that 
it is useless to study the mechanism of thought because of a 
superstitious fancy that there is some tertium quid that can never 
be apprehended. 

Yellowlees says that the brain of the scoundrel cannot be told 
from that of a Christian hero, nor that of the sane from the 
insane. Such sweeping claims have come to be greatly modified, 
as much depends on the method of examination, and granting 
the truth of the assertion in many cases, it should tell us that 
circumstances working upon identical materials may create for- 
tunate and unfortunate, the law-abiding and the criminal. As for 
insanity the chemist has begun to examine the contents of the 
blood vessels to see if insanity is not in many cases merely a poi- 
soned brain circulation. 

If we could get out of ourselves and regard everything objec- 
tively, unbiased by our feelings and the familiarity that blinds 
and deludes, we would be able to conceive this planet reduced to 
the size of a hickory nut, upon whose surface a magnifying appa- 
ratus would reveal lesser specs changing places, forms and col- 
ors. Further magnification would show us man looking like a 
period, growing to the stature of an exclamation point (probably 
a theist), or an interrogation point (probably a scientist). From 
these spring other dots, and the larger ones dissolve. All move 
about, some collide, others cling together, still others avoid one 



4IO THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

another. These simple movements, further inspection tells us, 
are caused by position changes effected by the more intimate par- 
ticles that compose the small objects. 

. Allowing the world with its flora and fauna to regain its nat- 
ural size and placing a man under our powerful microscope until 
he appears to be as large as the earth, we learn that all the grosser 
movements he has made were occasioned by the collision, cling- 
ing together, movements of avoidance and other place changes on 
the part of little spheres like bird shot and cricket balls, known 
as atoms and molecules. A very close and constant arrangement 
of these elementary balls constitute his bones, which are pulled 
to and fro by the sidewise and lengthwise rush of similar balls 
not so compactly arranged, which form the muscles. Great nerve 
cables of millet-seed like grains, here and there rapidly crowd 
one another, in turn producing commotion among the muscle 
components. But it is difficult to discern which is cause or effect 
in all this swirl. The big balls strike the little ones and start 
them agog, the little ones retaliate, to be in turn hit at by the 
larger. In fact cause and effect exchange places, and everything 
this bag of millet-seed, bird shot and cricket balls does depends 
upon the preponderance of one kind of molecules over the others, 
and an endless series of accidents. 

Here, for example, was an oxygen atom jerking away from 
less congenial company to seize upon two hydrogen atoms, the 
three balls then becoming known as a molecule of water, countless 
groups of which could be seen everywhere in our giant. Many 
of these H2O groups were very exclusively associating only with 
their own kind and repelling the advances of other molecules 
which sought their company ; but here and there one of the 
objectionable molecules happened to meet with some atoms it 
wanted and could capture and, presto, metamorphosis. The for- 
merlv repulsive A, which B avoided, picked up an X and no time 
was lost before ABX became a new molecular candidate for the 
envy, sycophancy and wiles of others. This X was often a metal- 
lic atom. 

Restoring our man to his less than six feet in height, his 
molecular make-up disappeared and we find that accidents of 
atomic grouping make this particular person present an ugly 



EVOLUTION OF THE 15KAIN. 4II 

appearance. I lis comrades with more pleasing- visages are not 
attracted to him; women deride and repel him. Chance fills his 
pockets with the element aurum, and a change occurs compara- 
ble to the one noted before. His acquisition enables him to select 
whom lie pleases as associates. One known as Fool and another 
called Knave became gilded and secured the sisters Cupidity, 
who, though detesting their mates, helped them to multiply their 
kind. These comparisons are not strained. There is more than 
simile or metaphor in them. If a house be built of bricks does 
not the pile of bricks preserve the individual brick nature? Be- 
cause it is a house it is none the less a brick pile, with all the 
properties, such as hardness, porosity, uninflammability, con- 
tained in each separate brick. Grouping of atoms into molecules 
and these into compound molecules do not make such combina- 
tions any the less chemical, even though man is the thing built 
from the molecules. 

We may start with the simple one-celled animal called the 
amceba. It is a representative of the modified cell that is found 
to produce, by multiplication of itself, all animal tissues. The 
muscles, membranes, skin, etc., of man are made up of cell upon 
cell of protoplasmic origin, closely allied to this unicellular or- 
ganism, and the white blood corpuscles are called amoeboid be- 
cause they resemble the amoebae surprisingly in all things. 

This amceba may be found, under the microscope, in stagnant 
water, damp earth, or in animal matter, creeping about with 
activity, but no constancy of direction. It seems to be a living 
speck of white of egg; the minute granules in it flowing first to 
one part, then another; pushing out "false feet" into which the 
entire mass flows, and so moves about. When it encounters 
food, usually minute vegetable particles, the substance passes into 
the animal composition, and what cannot be assimilated is merely 
moved away from — excreted. 

Insignificant as these amoebic motions appear, they are 
weighted with the most important problems life can present, for 
the quarrel is over what causes amoebae to move at all. Cope 
and others assign it to consciousness, or will power. Low forms 
of life, like this, may be kept dried and apparently dead, indefin- 



412 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND MIS MIND. 

itely, but moisture restores activity. Of itself this fact shows the 
mechanical nature of life. 

The main composition of the protoplasm of the amoeba, is 
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, represented by the sym- 
bols C, H, O, N. It feeds upon plants which contain similar ele- 
ments. In fact, it eats that to which it is chemically attracted. 
Its hunger, then, is chemical affinity. Assimilation, eating, is a 
process of molecular exchange, chemical saturation. Hydrogen 
hungers for oxygen. The amoebic protoplasm molecules CHON 
hunger for CHON. 2 

We have gained our first step in mental science. A feeling, a 
desire, is reduced to a chemical explanation. Remember it, for 
upon it every subsequent step depends : 

1. Hunger is chemical affinity, the desire inherent in atoms 
for one another. Hunger is the first, the primitive desire, so 
acknowledged by thinkers from other points of view, but they 
did not see what we now claim to be its origin. Growth of the 
mass must follow as the molecules add to their number, size and 
weight, by chemical combinations ; by eating. This is evident 
and axiomatic, but simple as it appears, like a geometrical axiom 
it is liable to be obscured or lost sight of as we advance. 

Growth, thus, is our second step gained : 

2. Growth arises from chemical saturation, from hunger 
satisfaction, from eating. This is more evident than i, in all ani- 
mal life. 

Next the amoeba reproduces itself by the simplest possible 

2 So much depends and could be said upon this inference, it can be but 
cursorily dealt with here. The objection to the atomic affinity likeness of 
hunger being in that protoplasm converts dead into living molecules, may 
be met by Hoppe-Seyler's claim (Chemical-Physiology Institute Inaugural 
Address) that living protoplasm consisted of anhydrous oxy-hydro-carbon 
molecules capable of motion in a hydrated medium. When such molecules 
combined with the water in which they moved, then the protoplasm was 
dead. Living protoplasm is like quantities of CHON moving in water : 
H 2 0; now if CHON, in certain quantities, becomes CHONH2O (while the 
symbolism is far from being exact), an idea of what occurs when pro- 
toplasm dies (the machine stoppage) may be gained. The next step 
toward dissolution being the breaking up of the compound altogether; the 
dismantling of the machine. But it is impossible to go deeply into such 
matters in popular essays. 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 41$ 

means, it divides as a consequence of overgrowth, and we then 
have two amcebae; the new additional form is excreted off from 
the old one. and observing that such particles as silica or lime 
carbonate, which it cannot take up are repelled, rejected, excreted, 
we find as a consequence that excretion depends upon, or is : 

a, chemical indifference or repulsion, 

b, a consequence of assimilation, 

c, an overgrowth consequence, in reproduction. 

3. Excretion is a consequence of hunger satisfaction. 

4. Reproduction is a consequence of growth, and a process 
of excretion. 

The amoeba absorbs oxygen and exhales carbonic acid ; it 
breathes. But oxygen is a food, and inhalation is but a process of 
assimilation, hence breathing is eating and proposition i includes 
it. The rejected, exhaled carbonic acid is excreted; so proposi- 
tion 3 includes that matter. 

Prehension, or taking hold of its food is another function, 
but it is only an effect of 1 ; attraction of molecules. The amoeba 
moves about, but the same molecular attractions account for such 
movements partly ; light sets up a series of attractive motions in 
it ; heat increases within certain limits its activity ; eddies move 
it, and the simplest explanation of light and heat attraction would 
be through their expanding the nearest portion acted upon, set- 
ting up a flow of granules into that part, resulting in a forward 
movement toward the light. The composition of forces would 
account even for its occasionally moving away from its food, 
thus : 

Let A represent the position of the amoeba at one instant ; the 
line A C the direction, and force, 10, of attraction of a ray of 
heat and light. The line A B, at right angles to A C, with the 
attraction 5 of a diatom, or some other molecular combination 
which is food and has attractive affinity for the amoeba. The 
parallelogram of forces will decide D to be the direction in which 
A will move ; apparently away from its food. 

These motions can be made more complex by the inconstancy 
of environment, heat, light, electricity, sound, chemism, eddies, 
all exerting their influences and confusing the directness of 
motion. 



414 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Lastly — 

5. Locomotion is clue to hunger (chemical affinity) and to 
other physical forces. We thus have all the life activities of this 
low animal explained as the result of force and matter. Objec- 
tively regarded we have satisfied the conditions, but fault may be 
found with having brought in the subjective term hunger. This 
can be disposed of by admitting that we can only judge of hun- 
ger objectively in others, whether man, dog, or amceba, by what 
it causes them to do, and comparing such actions with our own 
under like circumstances, which subjectively we realize to be due 
to hunger. Perhaps a feeble consciousness is a product of these 
molecular and mass motions — who can say? We have much of 
the aboriginal disposition to concede will power or sensibility to 
any complex mechanical motions. The Zuni Indians worshiped 
the great Corliss engine at the Chicago water-works, and wanted 
to cast themselves into its wheels as into the arms of a good 
spirit ; similarly the remark is often made by the intelligent and 
educated: "That locomotive acts as though it lived," or "That 
machine almost talks." If we knew the amceba to be composed 
of crystalline matter we would merely wonder at its mechanical 
motions ; because it is flesh-like we assign it life, though we know 
that flesh and crystals are but chemical elements differently com- 
bined. 

President Sorby, of the Royal Microscopical Society, esti- 
mates that in one one-thousandth of an* inch sphere of albumen 
(protoplasm), there are 530,000,000,000 molecules. With proto- 
zoa one-tenth, or one one-hundredth of an inch in size, there 
would be proportionately more. It becomes possible to conceive 
how organisms even a hundred-thousandth of an inch can molecu- 
larly exist. So the difference between the flea and the elephant, 
mentally as well as physically, need not be other than a merely 
quantitative one, for qualitative development may go on with the 
lesser number of molecules. Thus we surmount the idea that mere 
size of brain or body has anything to do with relative intellec- 
tuality considered as a molecular property. 

The albumino-id, protoplasmic, one-celled animal, the amceba, 
may be roughly represented as a pile of chemical atoms, each 
dot representing a molecule of such atoms. Attracted toward a 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. f 1 5 

piece o\ alga, which passes into the amoeba and causes it to grow. 
It rejects the uneatable part, and becoming too large, splits — re- 
produces. 

Under the designation chemism we have disposed of moving, 
breathing, eating; from which as a consequence proceeded 
growth, reproduction and excretion. We called the chemical at- 
traction involved in eating, hunger, a desire, a feeling, a sensa- 
tion. Do not let us get confused at this or any other stage, by 
mixing up terms, or making distinctions where none exist ; de- 
sires and feelings are sensations from first to last, and we shall 
so see them to be. Then sensation is nothing but molecular 
motion. When the lktle molecules are moving about, from what- 
ever cause, sensation is evoked. It is not sensation that moves 
them, but the movements produce the sensation ; which is a mere 
incident of the motion as friction heat is to machinery motion. 
All its motions have regard to satisfying hunger, and its mushy 
body is constructed to take hold of things. Prehension or taking 
hold of things is an ability merely developed, but not changed in 
the higher animal life, for arms, hands and jaws are for food 
prehension ; the legs and feet take hold of the ground in the food 
search; ribs assist other organs in oxygen (food) prehension. 
The fundamental life processes having merely more elaborate 
organs in the higher than in the lower forms, to conserve the 
same necessary ends. While in this protozoon the only sensation 
it has refers to eating, all other sensations are differentiated from 
it, and if you reflect a little, you will know that all thought is 
ultimately traceable to that homely act. Stop eating for a while 
and be convinced. 

You get from this your first philosophical conception of pain 
and pleasure. An unsatisfied tension of the amoebic molecules in 
the one and the act of gratification in the other. Indifference 
comes with plethora, which causes quiescence or cessation of 
maximum motion — an important fact, for satiety is akin to death. 
The filled up amoeba does not move. Activity increases in all 
animal life, within certain limits, with hunger or desire. Satis- 
faction palls, cloys. 

Fancy the molecules that compose protoplasm to be grouped 
in little piles, and when attracted to other similar molecules a 



416 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

commotion would occur. If this motion invariably took place 
under similar influences, then the more these influences occurred 
the better adjustment would there be to a repetition of them — 
adaptation and the motion-sensation would become instinctive, 
automatically induced. Now if food attraction caused this mo- 
tion once, it is apparent that it can do so again. The repetition 
of this motion would be one phase of memory. If this molecular 
disturbance were induced by some other cause than chemical 
attraction, such as a chance movement of the particles in the 
amoeba, then we have other phases of memory, anticipation, recol- 
lection and feelings, such as dreams are made of, imperfect, 
mixed. The Chladni figures may be cited. 

These Chaldni forms appear when a glass plate upon which 
sand is strewn is thrown into vibrations by musical notes. Each 
figure is definite for its producing note and will be reproduced by 
that note. 

Sensation may be likened to the vibration of a piano string 
produced in its usual way through the key and hammer stroke. 
Memory is the reproduction of the same vibrations, whether in- 
duced in the usual or some other way. 

Summing up what we have deduced from the protoplasmic 
motions, we have, life processes, such as eating, growth, excre- 
tion, reproduction and general locomotory movements accounted 
for as interacting physical force and matter, with incident and 
consequent production of pain and pleasure, sensation and 
memory. 

Minds unused to evolutionary conceptions will ask what all 
this has to do with man and his mentality. Refer to modern 
text books on physiology, embryology and histology (micro- 
scopic anatomy), botanical and zoological works, and you will 
discover statements clearly made or implied throughout, to the 
effect that man is but a colony of amceba-like cells, grouped and 
differentiated to effect better the same functions inherent in the 
original amoeba cell. While all the processes are carried on by 
one dot of protoplasm in the case of the one-celled animal, the 
many-celled animal, such as man, has certain groups of cells 
highly developed in one direction, others in another; with the 
necessary diminution of other abilities in the specially developed. 



EVOLUTION OV THE BRAIN. 4 1 7 

instances, just as the good blacksmith may not be a good clerk, 
but specialism has developed both as advantageous to society. 
The clerk and blacksmith are not the less men because special- 
ized, the brain and muscle cells are none the less cells. The asso- 
ciation of these functions with their sensations, through an inter- 
nuneial nervous system, may be likened to the metropolitan and 
continental linking of interests by telegraphs. In effect this will 
appear as we proceed, to be more than an analogy ; it is homology 
or identity. 

The monistic philosophy shows that society acts as the man 
acts, and his nature is that of his cells ; these in turn are governed 
by molecular attributes, but that man can react upon his compo- 
sition and give direction to his acts by conforming better to 
nature's laws, through knowing those laws ; and achieve thereby 
the maximum allotment of happiness for himself and others. 

The brain and nervous system are generally regarded as the 
centers of mind and sensation. The view is correct enough in 
one way and wholly erroneous in another, for there are more ani- 
mals without than with brains, or even nervous systems, to whom 
mind and sensation cannot properly be denied. 

The protoplasmic amceba, that reduces the problems of 
physiology to their simplest forms, is irritable. Mechanical irri- 
tation, such as the prick of a pin, will stimulate it to accelerated 
motion. Any living matter that thus explodes energy when 
stimulated is said to be ''irritable." Irritability is the function 
most highly developed in the nerves, especially the nerve centers, 
and it is through the motions induced we have the only objective 
evidence of sensation. If you prick a man and he writhes, you 
surmise he has felt it; if he does not move you do not know 
whether he felt the prick or not. Contractions are very com- 
mon manifestations of irritability, but so interchangeable are 
"vital'' and physical forces, sometimes the stimulus produces heat 
instead of ''vital'' movements. 

In the protoplasm, from which all the tissues proceed, reside 
the abilities of all those tissues. For example, the nervous sys- 
tem is eminently irritable, the muscles are eminently contractile ; 
other organs have developed special abilities, such as locomotory, 
prehensile, gustatory, reproductory, respiratory. What was pos- 



418 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

sessed undifferentiated by the simple protoplasmic cell has be- 
come separately the functions of particular groups of cells. How 
this came about is the problem of comparative physiology which 
the theory of evolution is solving. The body and mind are too 
indissolubly connected to admit of any psychology being other 
than absurd if all physiological functions are not discussed ; but 
the necessity for condensing compels us to skim over some of 
the most interesting processes of development with mere refer- 
ences. 

The one-celled developed into the many-celled animal, the 
morula or mulberry form, because the cells, instead of escaping, 
were bound together by an outer membrane. The morula ate and 
grew, as did the amceba, only when it burst by repletion it liber- 
ated one-celled animals that afterward became many-celled, sim- 
ply because the materials that composed the young were split 
off, inherited, from the parent, and for purely mechanical rea- 
sons the life history of parent and offspring would be the same. 

The gastrula stage comes next when the' many-celled animal, 
the mulberry form, collapsed and formed a bag with a layer of 
cells inside and another outside. This stage is represented by a 
vast number of animals, such as the sea-anemones and worms. 

Elongate the gastrula animal, and you have the worm shape. 
Gradual improvements occurred in some of these forms, as favor- 
able circumstances were encountered, and step by step the rudi- 
mentary intestine develops a stomach and other subsidiary or- 
gans, as the habits of the descendants change and adaptation is 
necessary. Blood vessels appear, and their evolution can be 
easily traced to the twisting of an artery upon itself to form a 
heart, and further. Likewise the course of limb growth through 
blunt projections, fins, up to wing or arm and feet successively ; 
the change of swimming bladder into lungs and the advancement 
of protoplasm into cartilage and some of the latter into unstriped 
muscle cells, thence into striped muscles. All this came about 
through accident. The collapsed morula found it had a bag in 
which albuminous substances could be held and digested better. 
The cells that lined this bag as naturally and readily developed 
into special eating cells as politicians become thieves — through 
opportunity, ability and desire. Special reproductory cells devel- 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 419 

oped from the internal sac. Every organ may be traced in its 
growth from the egg' (a single protoplasmic cell), and in its 
successive modifications in series of animals succeeding one an- 
other from the amoeba to the man. 

That the feeling of love was derived from hunger, and is 
identical with it in protozoa, has been previously explained. The 
folly of the metaphysical systems is evident in ignoring the bear- 
ings of this most powerful sentiment, and its derivation, upon all 
life relations. 

The relativity of the terms excretion and secretion is notice- 
able when we study how the cell groups live that make up the 
body. One set of cells may be situated to receive the unelabo- 
rated food, part of which it absorbs and part passes through its 
cellular contents changed to other conditions. This changed 
food becomes, perforce, that upon which the next set of cells 
thrive best, and we may follow these changes from meat and 
vegetables ingested to the secretion of milk and tears. 

Thus we are compelled to shamefully slur over the grand 
stories biology has to tell in the endeavor to reach the nervous 
system quickly. But perpetual reference to the other organs 
must be made to appreciate, anything like adequately, what the 
brain does. 

We have seen that certain cells develop extraordinarily what 
primarily was the single-cell ability. From the amoeba perform- 
ing with its one little protoplasmic dot all the life activities we 
have in the higher metazoa intestinal cells that elaborate food and 
hold other activities in abeyance, muscle cells that contract to 
stimuli, ovarian cells that centralize reproduction, lung cells that 
are mainly respiratory. 3 

To a greater or less extent the original abilities are preserved 
in every cell, no matter what function it serves. All cells must 
eat, secrete, reproduce — some rapidly, others slowly. The work 
devolving upon them determines how much of and what particu- 
lar character shall predominate, as with men. 

3 Observe that the lung is appended to the upper part of the alimentary 
canal as evidence of the association of eating and respiration, and that the 
oviducts and cloaca are connected in birds and embryos of higher animals, 
indicating the ingestive and excretory nature of multiplication. 



420 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

When the many-celled animal without a nervous system re- 
ceives an impression and responds to it by moving, the impulse 
is propagated from one cell to the next and but sluggish motions 
are induced. Manifestly it would be an advantage to have a 
telegraph system to cause instantaneous and united action. 

Little amoeba-like animals 4 happening to live where sand 
abounded picked up an overcoat of that material by agglutina- 
tion. The mollusc falling in with chalky and other lime particles, 
which it separated from its food by excretion, developed its shell 
because the secretion happened to adhere externally. The her- 
mit crab finds a covering already made, and occupies it by squat- 
ter right. It does not matter to any one of these how the advan- 
tage befell ; it is taken as such and adjusted to. The fighting cock 
will use the steel gaffs as though they had grown from his legs, 
nor is the cell a particle more particular. If it find in its environ • 
ment material that has enough affinity for it to remain in its 
vicinity, and a life process is subserved by that fact, things chem- 
ical and mechanical in nature perpetuate the association by nat- 
ural selection. 

As the rhizopod could not have acquired his covering where 
there was no sand, the ancestral worm could not have picked up 
a nervous system in the absence of assimilable phosphates. These 
nerve compounds had a molecular mode of action altogether dif- 
ferent from anything experienced before by the animals. With 
evolution of higher types the explosive substance was excreted 
irregularly and later more definitely, as Cope has shown 5 was 
the case with the skeletons of early reptilia. Next an encapsulat- 
ing membrane formed about these lines of phosphatic granules in 
obedience to the ordinary pathological process that an intermedi- 
ary tissue forms about any foreign substance as a resultant of the 
mode of operation of the two tissues. In due time an area of 
nerve granules finds itself being suppressed at one point and ar- 
ranged at another until the fully developed nervous system 
appears. 

The possibility of so important a structure as the nervous 
having been acquired by accident, seems preposterous, but let us 

4 The rhizopod (astrodiscus arenaceus). 

5 Fossil Batrachia, American Naturalist, 1883. 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 42 1 

reason from other matters to it. You realize that accident kills 
many. If you study the matter closer you will be convinced it 
kills more. Accidents determine such things as marriages and 
births as well as deaths. Fortune and misfortune are accidental, 
more than anything else. 

At first doubtless this was a disease, an excrescence that was 
By chance and accident is here meant what is generally accepted 
to be their meanings. Strictly speaking when everything is the 
outcome of some preceding cause, there can be no such phenom- 
enon as an accident, but in the sense of opposed to design it is a 
convenient term. 

Bony excretions at first indefinitely arranged served but a 
feeble purpose, but afterward definitely arranged in lines relating 
the muscles contraction became more direct and useful. 

At first all tissues indifferently exuded the bone and nerve 
granules, but eventually certain cells became the ones best suited 
to elaborate these materials and we have the osteal and the nerve 
cells as a result of this high grade evolution. 

When nerve granules began to be linearly arranged even 
then these rudimentary nerves served but haphazard uses. Each 
pellet w r as an excreted compound of phosphorus with organic 
hydro-carbonaceous materials which, however faintly it exploded, 
when disturbed, became a new experience in the environment to 
be reckoned with. Heat and light increased its molecular "kick." 
Electricity, though less often met with, affected the substance 
annoying to the animal, but a readjustment occurred on the basis 
of reconciliation and a new mode of life-working. The cells then 
were shocked by the new tissue, but such forms as could not rid 
themselves of it encapsulated it, covered it, just as a bullet in the 
body would be covered, in time, by a sac. The intercellular dis- 
tribution of these nerve granules would now exert no effect upon 
the cells, but whenever, by occasional exposure of the granules 
to an influence that would cause the explosion, it was discovered 
that instead of having to wait for motions to be transferred from 
cell to cell before the entire organism could be affected by motory 
causes this new tissue conveyed the needed stimulation promptly 

8 Kleinenberg's Hydra and Hubrecht's low worm. 



422 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

to a distant cell in a very simple way. The law of least resist- 
ances determined the next step. The granules would, from being 
diffused, be arranged, by the motions of the low animal, in some 
kinds of lines, even though badly defined ones. The quick con- 
veyance of impressions made the cell colony more energetic, and 
wherever this energy happened to conserve life the species with 
the most definite nerve strands survived. 

Hunger would develop colonial motion in the direction of 
hunger appeasing movements. The part which is most affected, 
the intestinal tract, becomes for the time being the center of 
stimuli production. 

The law of association steps in to determine what cells shall 
be united. The general cell need of oxygen establishes a muscu- 
lar and nervous means for circulation, and other hunger appeas- 
ing processes make routes and means elsewhere. 

Y\ "hat is known as the neuroglia or gray matter of the nerv- 
ous system I regard as the product of cells that have developed 
molecular irritability above all other functions ; the fact that this 
gray matter is without cell membranes counts for nothing — de- 
velopment necessitated this peculiarity. 

A highly sensitive neuroglia substance would transmit its irri- 
tations rapidly to a contiguous highly contractile muscle, then 
when the sensitive neuroglia was concealed and nerve granules 
conveyed the impressions inward the next arrangement appears, 
the "sensory nerves." 

Better definition gives the lines of nerves instead of the 
plexus. 

Then follows an illy arranged set of nerves between the mus- 
cles and the gray matter, afterward becoming better arranged 
as the "motor nerves." This is really what occurs in the embryo- 
logical development of every animal that has a nervous system at 
all, as well as in the "phylogeny," or evolutionary progress. 

We are now prepared to consider reflex nervous action. Join 
a lot of these segments and we have the spinal cord and nerves 
of the connecting link between vertebrates and invertebrates. 7 

Up to this stage indifferent tissues have secreted the nerve 



Amphioxus lanceolatus. 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 423 

granules; thereafter the basis substance of sensation, the neu- 
roglia, A. develops these nerve elements, and under the micro- 
scope the homogeneity of the neuroglia disappears, and ascend- 
ing through intelligence becomes more and more filled with fibrils 
of fine granules of a nervous character. 8 

Yet development goes on and the neuroglia generates nerve 
cells, whose office it is to more rapidly and readily form these 
granules for the axis cylinders of the nerves. 

The number of impulses or irritations required to produce a 
continued contraction in the feebler developed muscles is thirty 
per second : in the voluntary muscles, such as are concerned in 
moving the body or limbs, nineteen and one-half per second. 9 
Fewer impulses passing over a nerve result in tremors or trem- 
bling. A lowered vitality, such as drunkards exhibit, or when 
there is emotional diversion, interferes with the proper succession 
of impulses, and the muscles are tremulous. 

The inseparableness of psychic and physical life is evident 
from lowest to highest, but may be well illustrated by the head- 
less lancelet and the lamprey eel with a feeble but better devel- 
oped nervous system. The next step essentially represents the 
spinal cord of the lancelet, with ingoing sensory and outgoing 
motor nerves. If an irritation passes over one of the first-men- 
tioned nerves and reaches the gray irritable matter of the cord 
the irritability is communicated up and down the gray and irra- 
diated to the general muscular system through the motor nerves. 
Diffusion. Xow, if a certain sensory nerve bundle became sub- 
jected more than others to a peculiar impression the nearest 
motor nerves would not only respond most energetically, but the 
gray molecules would perforce arrange themselves better to ac- 
commodate the passage of the impulse. Here we have our sen- 
sation and memory again, only in this case with special tissues 
for their seat — the neuroglia. But the motions are just as liable 
not to serve as to serve a useful purpose, and that is the fact we 
can observe when a worm or even some low vertebrate is inter- 
fered with : their motions do not seem to be properly adjusted to 

B Exner. 
9 Helmholz. 



424 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

a reasonable end, as when the eel in escaping wriggles toward 
instead of away from you. Plainly such low forms as bv acci- 
dent procured a better adjustment and moved in response to 
stimuli in a way to secure prey and escape enemies would not 
only survive but multiply by descent the higher forms so insti- 
tuted, and these improved nervous systems would lift their suc- 
cessors gradually through the vertebrate series to the highest 
life. 

If there be a choice of two routes for the passage of the im- 
pulse in the gray matter the wavering between these two routes 
constitutes hesitation, which we shall see a little later on is the 
basis of doubt, thought, reason ! When by any superiority of 
advantage over the other a route is selected the irritation disturbs 
a more direct tract of molecules in the cord gray, so as to invari- 
ably respond to the given stimulus, and a certain set of muscles 
are moved, then automatism is established, and we have instinct, 
which is the end, the aim, the death of reason. 

The single-celled organism is a wandering nomad, but when 
several cells cohere, for a common life purpose, the condition is 
that of a savage mob, until special abilities develop in the sepa- 
rate cells; then the tribal condition arises. If these cells are not 
properly related to one another, and food is unequally distributed, 
causing many to perish while the few are surfeited, the animal 
represents an absolute monarchy. When an advance is made 
and the needs of the multitude are better supplied, the condition 
resembles that of a limited monarchy. I maintain (notwithstand- 
ing Hseckel's different view), that the republic is typified by a 
healthy homo sapiens — worthy of that specific title, composed of 
cells, altruistically, though mechanically, grouped into organs, no 
one of which cells or organs demands or receives more than suf- 
ficient to serve the good of all. A diseased state would result 
otherwise, and if the surplus be among intestinal organs then the 
government is for politicians and privileged classes. 

The ideal man may no more exist than does the ideal repub- 
lic ; but theoretically the brain rules the body in the interests and 
by the consent of all the bodily units. If a specially favored con- 
trolling power arises in such a government and the muscles or 
the alimentary tract gain control we have the military or the mer- 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 425 

cantile, the pugnacious or gluttonous dominance. The evolution 
of nations, societies, species or individuals proceeds over identical 
paths : The lowest animal is a defenseless absorber of food ; a 
few steps higher in the zoological series there is ferocity ; higher 
still, cunning. The human infant passes through the stages of 
milk imbibing, savagery, barbarism, to more thoughtful man- 
hood. Nations reach civilization by developing industrialism 
which binds together workers intelligently and considerately. 
When militancy prevails development is arrested, the country is 
a lubberly schoolboy with a chip on his shoulder. The wise adult 
has outgrown his childish greed and bellicosity, no longer lies, 
steals or wastes time in buffoonery. He thinks. But, to think 
he must have the apparatus for thinking. Printing, telegraphy 
and rapid transit bring the individuals of a people into sensible 
cooperation and the silly sword, gun and clownish uniform finds 
less favor. The physical basis of intelligence is proclaimed by 
two facts : 

1. The nervous system relates the body cells together in the 
interests of all the cells of the body. 

2. The brain relates the nervous system more complexly to 
the same end. 

A direct ethical inference is, then, that charity, forgiveness, 
considerateness, justice, etc., are expediency outgrowths and that 
humanity is but a form of wisdom. I would like to take my 
readers over the studies I have found so fascinating : Embry- 
ology*, neurology and other branches of biology ; but must resist 
the temptation to ramble over this naturalists' paradise and keep 
within the hedgerows of our text. We have not the time to fol- 
low out the development of the nerves that ascend the spinal cord 
to the head, the passage of touch nerves into those for special 
sense with end organs such as the eye, ear and nose ; the accumu- 
lation of "commissures" or connecting strands of nerves in the 
brain. You will find those matters fairly treated by Wundt, 
Spencer, Bain and the modern physiologists generally. 

Elongated, headless animals, through locomotion becoming 
easiest with one end first, gave rise to animals with heads, as 
the eel, because the head end encountering soonest the changes 
in the environment, differentiation' would be most likely to pro- 



426 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ceed at the head. The special senses grouped themselves here in- 
stead of being scattered as they are in lower forms of life. Mo- 
tions becoming oftenest regulated from the head a longitudinal 
series of nerves sprang up which afterwards became the lat- 
eral nerve columns of the cord, these relate the other seg- 
ments of the body with the special sense organs and by enabling 
the body to be controlled mainly through higher differentiated 
senses a decided advance is made in the organism evolution. 

The highest animals have the most complex nervous systems ; 
doubt, hesitation, thought or reason, essentially the same process, 
exercise nerve centers that are more nearly the protoplasmic state, 
such as the neuroglia ; greater heat is evolved, more blood is con- 
sumed and the effort is attended by consciousness. 10 The spinal 
cord gray matter undergoes this vibratory transfer and so ani- 
mals without heads may think, but when the tracts are built up so 
as to make the motions instinctive, such as tossing off a fly from 
the hand, consciousness need not be involved ; the automatic appa- 
ratus works reflexly, with less friction, less heat, less blood con- 
sumption, and with but feeble sensation evolution. 

In learning to play upoon the piano the higher senses, with 
touch, are brought into use; the routes through the brain and 
cord to correlate the finger movements are being established with 
difficulty. When the piece is learned it may be played in the dark 
with but the finger touch sense to guide. A revolution has been 
effected in the arrangement of the nerve strands in the brain 
and adjustment of muscles in the arm and fingers has also oc- 
curred. Reason was involved at the outset. Instinct was the out- 
come, and where certain invariable causes produce in any animal 
invarible effects, brain shapes may be thus built up and transmit- 
ted to progeny ; inherited ; and as soon as the structural form of 
brain is developed the animal will do what its mechanism has been 
constructed to do, the chicken will peck as soon as it escapes from 
its shell. Dispositions and traits are thus transmitted with the 
"intuitions," superstitions, dexterities and stupidities. 

We do and think what our molecular make-up permits us to do 

30 Prof. Herzen, Journal of Mental Science, London, April, 1884: "The 
intensity of consciousness is in direct ratio to the intensity of functional 
disintegration." 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 427 

and think, and that make-up is the product of our environment. 

Assume that the nerves all over the body are in a state of 
chemical agitation represented by 100,000,000 vibrations per' 
second, io 7 becomes the normal for nerve activity, departures 
from which constitute sensation. Lowering of this normal pro- 
duces numbness, irregularity, pain. If from 50 to 1,400 interrup- 
tions occur the feeling of touch is experienced ; 45 to 40, 000 con- 
stitute hearing ; much more rapid interferences induce sight sen- 
sations. Most of these impressions produce quivers diffused 
through the gray neuroglia of the cord and brain, but when re- 
currences arrange the minute molecules of that sensitive gray 
substance into little lines, paths, tracts, fibrils, fasciculi, plexuses, 
memory is evoked ; the impression is recorded, and each such im- 
pression produces in the brain a corresponding alteration constant 
for the same cause. 

In the back part of the brain, where sight impressions are re- 
corded, a peculiar eight-layered arrangement of cells and fibrils 
is found ; where hearing memories are stored up, at the side of 
the brain, other distributions occur. I am, for brevity sake, re- 
duced to the necessity of using coarse similes where precise de- 
tails can be given, and experience all the disgust of the engineer 
who is obliged to forego technicalities and explain that his com- 
plicated machine acts by the piston pushing certain rods and 
wheels, when dozens of delicate principles must be unmentioned. 

These stored-up recorded impressions are more complexly 
united through nerve tracts that grow more and more intricate as 
intelligence increases. 

Roughly, then, suppose all the gas and water pipes, sewers, 
mains, conduits or other things in a city, that permit water to 
flow through them, were connected. A constant pressure of 
water constantly trickling through the smaller tubes and rushing 
along the larger would represent the normal nerve flow. Inter- 
ruptions in different degrees and for different lengths of time 
may be likened to what occurs when a touch, sound, sight, taste 
or smell is experienced. If there occur impediments en route, 
and at first it is uncertain which route the water will take, there is 
hesitation, which is reason, doubt, thought. The facile passage 
of the current is instinct, the route overcome. 



428 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Dropping the comparison, a thought works in the brain slowly 
or swiftly by a succession of molecular oscillations, and taking a 
brain region as a cube with one side divided into areas figured 
from 1 to 100, another side lettered from A to Z, the remaining 
side similarly lettered a to z, then one thought would be ex- 
pressed by the flashing of atoms along the irregular route 7, L, n, 
75, and another R. 19, K. x., and so on. Microscopical anato- 
mists have mapped out hundreds of thousands of these routes. 
The orderly mechanism of the brain is being revealed, its laws are 
being unfolded patiently, toilsomely, quietly, by skillful, learned 
students, most of whom are steeped in bitter poverty ; who seek 
no notoriety, receive no assistance, whose writings are read by the 
appreciative few; their contributions swell the sum of human 
knowledge, and with knowing that the world is better off for 
their having lived they must be satisfied, as sole recompense. 

As the pseudo-sciences alchemy and astrology gave rise to 
chemistry and astronomy, so phrenology has been succeeded by 
craniology and cerebrology. Races are now known to have head 
shapes peculiar to themselves ; but only in a general way does the 
skull conformation indicate mentality. Oliver Wendell Holmes 
says : "You can tell by bumps what is in a man's head as readily 
as what is in a safe by feeling its door knob." 

Most of the phrenological deductions are illogical and many 
are controverted by facts. For instance, "vitativeness," or the 
desire to live, is located by phrenology over the mastoid process, 
behind the ear ; a huge bump of bone into which a lancet is often 
deeply thrust by surgeons without fear of touching the brain. 
The "perceptives" — form, size, color, weight appreciation, are 
placed along the eyebrow ridge, though the brain is very remote 
from that part, and primitive races, or even apes, have the largest 
development of that arch. 

Gall observed that the best scholars had protuberant eyes, so 
he located "language" behind the optic, an absurd proceeding, for 
the widely opened eye is an expression of wonder, the exercise of 
which faculty has led to erudition in general. In Gall's time lin- 
guistics were the height of knowledge, hence his conclusions. 
Constructiveness and combativeness belong to a high grade of in- 
tellect, and while we can deny that they have the exact locations 



i:\ OLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 429 

ied by phrenologists it is not remarkable that the increased 

brain size that accompanies brain exorcise should widen the head 
in the region assigned to these bumps. Reasoning power and 
pertinacity could more properly be thus placed, but as the frontal 
brain develops and broadens the forehead the skull does not al- 
ways keep pace with this growth, so that one with a narrow or 
even low forehead may have a large brain compressed into nar- 
rower compass. Per contra, the disease called hydrocephalus 
may give the idiot the "front of Jove." There is a tendency ot 
the cranium to adapt itself to brain growth, but the rigid bones 
require centuries to establish radical changes; the softer tissues 
beneath folding up in lines of least resistance. It can be readily 
seen from this how head shape could be a race characteristic, but 
give no clue to individual traits, save in the crudest ways. 

Says Prof. Gunning: 11 "In the Museum of the Smithsonian 
Institution may be seen a cranium of enormous size and most 
perfect symmetry. Such a noble forehead ! and balanced against 
this such a perfect backhead ! All the lines and curves so strong, 
so graceful ! 

"The owner of the head was a miserable Indian who never 
got from it so much as a beaver trap !" 

The new phrenology is deduced from the study of the brain 
itself and brings into that study mathematics, physics, chemistry 
^and other sciences where the old phrenology was isolated in this 
respect, often defiant of exact knowledge. O. S. Fowler used to 
say to his audiences "Newton's Principia is all bosh. It is not 
gravitation that holds the planets in space ; I have discovered 
that it is electricity." The new phrenology is cultivated by 
learned, modest men, who never give character charts. 

The incidental mention of relative and absolute brain weights 
and sizes of the sexes, by an author in the Popular Science 
Monthly (April, 1887), brought out a rather peppery reply and a 
rejoinder in succeeding numbers. Correlative articles made a 
timely appearance in the July issue. 

Time-honored post-mortem statistics were cited and sneered 
at, but the very evident fact was maintained that the average 
female brain weight was less than that of the male. 

11 Life History of Our Planet, p. 289. 



430 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

The main points brought out are as follows: 

The brain of the child is larger in proportion to its body than 
is that of the adult, but immaturity should prevent too many stu- 
dies being undertaken in youth. 

The men and women who have made the most of themselves 
are those who have began to study hard after they have reached 
adult life. 

The skull of the human male is of greater capacity than that 
of the female, and civilization increases the difference. The 
average male brairi weighs a little over forty-nine ounces, the 
female a little over forty-four ounces, or about five ounces less. 
The proportion being 100:90. 

Relatively to the weight of the body the difference is in favor 
of women. The body of the female is shorter and weighs less 
than that of the male. Thus in man the weight of the brain to 
that of the body average as 1 :36.5c, while in women it is as 
1 '.36.46, a difference of .04 in her favor. 

A large brain may have its gray cortical substance thinner 
than a smaller brain. 

In man the frontal lobe, separated from the posterior portion 
by the "fissure of Rolando," affords 43.9 per cent, of the total 
brain length in the male, 31.3 per cent, in the female. 

The specific gravity is greater in male than female brains, but 
this increases in insanity and old age in both sexes. Dr. Ham- 
mond makes a fair allusion to the mental differences of the sexes, 
based upon the foregoing, but his critic construes his remarks 
into implying female incapacity and inferiority. She quotes Top- 
inard to the effect that "the brain increases with the use we make 
of it." 

Dr. Hammond defends his position by asserting that the men- 
tal differences of the sexes are due to women not having availed 
themselves of the advantages offered them by civilization. He 
does not deny that there are some female brains of superior 
weight and that some women have excelled, mentally, but as a 
rule he holds that women are logically defective. 

•Romanes alleges for women a comparative absence of origi- 
nality, particularly in the higher levels of intellectual work, but 
there is no disparity in powers of acquisition after adolescence; 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 43 I 

young' girls being more acquisitive than boys of the same age. 
After development the male has the greater power of amassing 
knowledge. Woman's information is less wide and deep and 
thorough than that of a man. In musical execution he concedes 
equality. The female lacks judgment and impartiality, but is 
more refined in her sense faculties, her perceptions are more 
rapid, thoughts swifter, but superficial. Her will control is less, 
her temper is unstable and emotions shallow. Coyness, caprice, 
vanity, love of display and admiration for pageants, society and 
even "scenes," characterize her. Romanes concurs with Lecky : 
"In the courage of endurance females are superior, but their 
passive courage is not so much fortitude which bears and defies, 
as resignation which bears and bends. They rarely love truth, 
though they adore what they call 'the truth,' or opinions derived 
from others, and hate vehemently those who differ from them. 
Their thinking is a mode of feeling, they are generous but not in 
opinion. They persuade rather than convince and value belief 
as a source of consolation rather than as a faithful expression of 
the reality of things." 

Romanes attributes all this to their not having enjoyed the 
same educational advantages as men, and accords women pre- 
eminence in affection, sympathy, devotion, self-denial, modesty, 
long-suffering, reverence, religious feeling and morality. Fem- 
inine taste is good in small matters but untrustworthy where intel- 
lectual judgment is required. He attributes much to the coarser 
nature of man suppressing female chances for equality, and holds 
that the coyness, caprice and allied weaknesses and petty deceits 
are acquired and inherited self-defense traits, intensified by natu- 
ral and sexual selection. 

We have room only to indicate some important matters that 
were wholly neglected or but merely hinted at by the writers. 

The processes of development known as embryology alone 
settle the matter of sex differentiation, and proclaim woman to 
be a very highly organized being — exquisitely adjusted to an im- 
portant life relation, that dominates her intellectually as well as 
physically, affording her the advantage of mental refinements and 
the disadvantage of physical inferiority. In the offspring there 
is a fusion of advantageous traits that at first belong to both 



432 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

sexes unequally ; acquired beauties of form or character that 
sexual selection perpetuates and perfects. The mental and phys- 
ical superiority of the average male needs the amiable governance 
of the female disposition. This is most apparent in mining coun- 
tries where males preponderate and unconsciously grow coarse 
in their manners and ways of thinking. 

The microscope has transferred the conception of degrees of 
intelligence from gross to finer morphology. Mere brain weight 
counts for nothing, except for the crudest generalizations. Of 
more consequence are the relative quantities of white and gray 
matter in brains, the associating nerve bundles, that pass in show- 
ers of minute telegraph lines between brain parts, and of equal, 
if not transcendant, importance, the disposition and development 
of the blood vessels. Also given two brains exactly alike a dif- 
ference in the heart's ability to supply blood to the brain will 
determine stupidity in one and intellect in the other. Intelligence 
depends more upon the quantitative relating fibers of parts of the 
brain than upon weights, and a forty-ounce brain may have a 
more intricate microscopic development that one that weighs 
fifty ounces. 

The normal brain exists in ratios related to muscular develop- 
ment and the brain-weighing methods fully demonstrate that 
woman is the equal of man in this particular ; that is, in propor- 
tion to physical development there is no difference in the asso- 
ciated brain quantity in the sexes. 

New avenues are opening up to women and decades change 
our views concerning women's capacities. Let there be the full- 
est chance for her development. She cannot surpass in certain 
matters, but let opportunity and not a priori prejudice settle what 
she can and cannot do. It is idle to fear that she will become 
the intellectual and physical monster of Bulwer's Coming Race. 
There are physiological reasons that set limits for both sexes. 

The Neanderthal skull was found in a cavern near Diissel- 
dorf in 1856 in a diluvial stratum associated with a human skele- 
ton and bones of extinct species of animals. The skull presents 
striking peculiarities ; it has no forehead, but the eyebrow ridges 
are excessively developed, the bones are thick and heavy, the 
shape elliptical, sutures nearly all consolidated and the occipital 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 433 

region is very protuberant; it is dolicoccphalic, the capacity ht- 
ing t220 c.C A skull from Engis, Belgium, was somewhat simi- 
lar, and Prof. Moorehead, of Ohio, reports having found many 
similar crania in the tombs of the mound builders. The jaw of 
La Xaulette, of Belgium, was associated with elephant and rhi- 
noceros remains, but many additional corroborative findings 
merely assign an earlier date to the discoveries mentioned. 

Welcker asserts that short men incline more to wide heads and 
tall men to long heads, which may prove to be the main issues in 
the much-discussed matter of cephalic length and width of races. 

Brain size is no indication of the amount of intellect. The 
sensory areas of the brain are necessary to intellect. The frontal 
lobes are necessary to the highest intellect. Broca confirmed this. 
The more intellectual brain parts act as checks upon the propensi- 
ties. Shuttleworth examined 500 idiot brains and 500 of chil- 
dren in a normal school, and found no> apparent difference in size. 
A poorly developed part of the brain may cause loss of intellect. 
Attempts to localize insanities such as melancholia and mania 
in the brain are absurd. Many brain physiologists lack knowl- 
edge of psysics and chemistry, and often mistake conditions for 
materials and fancy that light, heat, electricity and sound, are 
things instead of modes of motion. 

Cuvier's brain weighed sixty-four ounces, Gambetta's only 
thirty-nine ounces. Spitzka claimed that Cuvier's weight repre- 
sented healed up hydrocephalus and not intellect. Cuvier's treat- 
ment of Lamarck indicated that he lacked the higher sentiments. 
Thirty years averages the attainment of the full insight and size 
of the human brain. Topinard quotes Colin that the mouse has 
more brain than man in proportion to his body, and thirteen times 
more than the horse and eleven times more than the elephant. 

In the chapter on language there is mention of the speech 
center in the right-handed person being on the left side of the 
brain and of its being a part of the symbolic field concerned in 
movements of the hand and face, so that writing with the right 
hand has a close association with the ability to speak in adjoin- 
ing parts of the brain. 

Herbert Spencer 12 states : "While the rudimentary nervous 

12 Synthetic Philosophy. 



434 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

system consisting of a few threads and minute centers is very 
much scattered, its increase of relative size and increase of com- 
plexity go hand in hand with increased concentration and in- 
creased multiplicity and variety of connections. Gray matter 
contains five times as many capillaries as white, based on cubed 
averages from Kolliker's plates, and from this he infers greater 
composition and decomposition in gray areas. The conditions 
essential to nervous action are continuity of nerve substance, ab- 
sence of much pressure, heat within certain limits, suitable quan- 
tity and quality of blood supply, waste must be fully met by re- 
pair, nerves are capable of exhaustion, and they require an ap- 
preciable time to convey impressions, every part of the nervous 
system is every instant traversed by waves of molecular change — 
here strong and there induced by the primary waves now arising 
in this place and now in that, and each nervous act helps to ex- 
cite the general vital processes while it achieves some particular 
vital process. The recognition of this fact discloses a much 
closer kinship between the functions of the nervous system and 
organic functions at large than appears on the surface. Though 
unlike the pulses of the blood in many respects, the pulses of 
molecular motion are like them in being perpetually generated 
and diffused throughout the body, and they are also like them in 
this, that the centrifugal waves are comparatively strong while 
the centripetal waves are comparatively feeble. To which analo- 
gies must be added that the performance of its office by every 
part of the body, down even to the smallest, just as much depends 
on the local gushes of nervous energy as it depends on the local 
gushes of the blood. 

Spencer 13 defines growth as increase in size and development 
as increase in structure, hence the one does not imply the other 
always, the finer construction of an educated brain may occupy 
less space that a similar organ in the hydrocephalic idiot. 

In ants the head ganglia are very large, and in the Hymenop- 
tera larger than in the less intelligent, as in the case of beetles. 

A factor in brain evolution was in the change of a four- 
handed animal using all such members also as feet into a two- 

13 Ibid. 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 435 

handed animal, causing the forward hands, and of course the 
brain part regulating them, to be more highly specialized, for 
more complexity of such a brain part must necessarily follow. 

Dr. Hancock, of Chicago, suggested to me that the absence of 
convolutions in the bird's brain could be owing to the absence of 
pressure of the cranium, which in turn is due to the abundance 
of room for growth of both skull and brain in the egg. 

The brain of the cockroach is less specialized. This insect is 
one of the very oldest and retains its ancient nerve centers, but 
the locust's brain is highly developed. 14 The ants and bees have 
the highest insect brains, as shown by Dujardin, Diet and Flagel. 
These brains of the social insects, ants and bees, are more compli- 
cated than other winged insects with greater complexity of the 
folds of the folded disc-like bodies capping the double stalk of 
other organs. 

The shark's medulla oblongata is often the largest part of the 
brain, but in bony fishes it becomes smaller. In the sharks when 
the medulla is large there are swellings analogous to interverte- 
bral ganglia on the roots of the vagi nerves on the sides of the 
fourth ventricle. Food proclivities predominate in the sharks 
and the teleosts are not so voracious, owing to a development of 
higher faculties so that function and structure are associated in 
this respect. The lower grades of fishes rush straight toward 
their food without hesitation, w^hile the higher grade hang back 
and inspect the food from a distance, exhibiting the results of 
higher brain development, causing them to adopt the wisest and 
safest course. The shark is greedy and uses the brute force of 
intelligence ; other fishes are more cautious and inclined to strat- 
egy. And a measure of what vulgarly passes for bravery may 
be made in the recklessness of the shark and other fishes of low 
intelligence as compared with the actions of other animals who 
exercise caution. 

A rudimentary part of the brain known as the pineal body or 
gland is larger before than after birth, and in some lizards has 
been found to exist as an eye on top of their heads, the eye 
structure being plainly visible under the microscope. This loss 

"Am. Nat., Apr. and May, 1881, A. S. Packard, Jr. 



436 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

of the third eye is no more remarkable than the conversion of the 
swimming bladders of fishes into lungs or the gills into thyroids, 
or that a long intestine should shrink into the troublesome vermi- 
form appendix of man. 

The pons develops with increase of the cerebellar hemis- 
pheres. 15 The optic lobe predominates in fishes and birds. The 
cerebrum appears to be a secondary projection from other lobes. 
The attempts to preserve a better balance in the erect position 
and to coordinate other movements is the great factor in creation 
of fibrils in the central nervous system. The destruction of these 
fibrils will interfere with correct movements. Cell processes are 
less rich the lower the animal. 16 

Waldeyer in 1891 announced a theory of neurons, essentially 
that nerves were projected from the nerve cells, 17 and Schafer am- 
plified the subject, 18 but by reference to my Comparative Physiolo- 
gy and Psychology, p. 157, 1883, it will be seen that I antedated 
Waldeyer by ten years in a lecture in 1881. As an addition to 
the explanation I said that the neuron theory is not strictly a 
rule for nerves may be laid down in tissues before the nerve cell 
appears, I would further suggest that when forces travel in 
definite directions the granules become encapsulated and form 
cells and nerve coverings, so when there is diffusion of impulses 
the nerve granules remain uncovered, but when directions are 
definite then the nerve cell appears and develops the nerve strands 
from it as a center. 

Mind includes every life activity for what corresponds to the 
sympathetic nervous system of man regulating his unconscious 
physiological processes is the mental apparatus of the inverte- 
brates. 

The mental mechanism and workings are best understood in 
their simplest aspects. A boy could not master a Corliss engine 
till the main principles are understood and these are best learned 
in the simplest engines. 

15 Gegenbaur, p. 510. 

16 Spitzka, Journal Nervous and Mental Dis., Oct., 1879, p. 629. 

17 Deutsche Med. Woch. Ueber Einege neue Forschungen im Gebeite 
der Anatomie d. Centralnervuen systems. 

18 Brain, p. 134, 1893. 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 437 

In my previous work, referred to, 1!> I suggest that the brain 
lobes have been formed by development of simpler ganglia, such 
as the swellings on the sensory nerves near the spinal cord, known 
as intervertebral ganglia, and that the stoppage or diversion of 
impulses is a function of these bodies, which are large on the 
acoustic nerves of fishes, probably to blunt sounds of no use to 
the fish. The cerebellum being composed of these blunting gan- 
glia, excision therefore does not cause noticeable results. 

The foremost portion of the brain, called the prefrontal lobes, 
are, according to Dana, 20 and other specialists in nervous dis- 
eases, concerned in volition and the power of self-control, concen- 
tration of thought and attention (Ferrier). They form a high 
association centre. Injuries of this part of the brain produce 
changes of character, indicated by irritability, mental enfeeble- 
ment, lack of power to concentrate the mind or to control the 
acts or emotions. A case is reported 21 of prefrontal brain tumor 
with loss of memory of recent events, emotionalism, loss of de- 
cency, shame and propriety. He grew sleepy, dull, apathetic, lost 
all attention for any length of time, and his lack of judgment was 
remarked. Slight paralysis of lower right face, and recovery 
on removal of a tumor from the left prefrontal tip of lobe. A 
boy named R. S. King, in 1880, injured the front of his forehead, 
exposing a triangular part of the brain, the side was not recorded, 
and some one cut off the protruding piece of brain, after which 
the boy became ungovernable, developed a reckless disposition, 
and was drowned while swimming. 

The forehead of the well-known Laura Bridgman grew larger 
as her education progressed. 

The importance of the frontal lobe in mental states is con- 
ceded by all writers on the brain. 22 

Dr. Alex. Hedlicka 23 says that white children present more 
diversity, negro children more uniformity of physical character- 
istics which increases as time passes. In the black the forehead 

19 Comp. P. and P., p. 180. 

20 Diseases of the Nervous System, p. 372. 
"Lancet, Feb. 8, 1902, p. 363. 

" Gowers, Diseases of the Brain, p. 178. 
23 Am. Anthropologist, Nov., 1898. 



43^ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

is narrower, the face more prognathic, the malar bones are larger, 
the nose is shorter, the lips more prominent, the mouth is broader, 
the teeth are stronger, the dentition is more regular, the uvula is 
shorter and stouter, the lower jaw is higher and stronger; the 
colored girl before puberty resembles the boy more than the white 
girl does. 

Skulls of Europeans have increased in size since historic 
times, and civilization has raised the anterior and flattened the 
occipital parts of the skull, according to Abbe Frere, of the An- 
thropological Museum of Paris. 

Broca further shows that cultivation of the mind and intellec- 
tual work augments the size of the brain and this increase chiefly 
affects the anterior lobes. Parchappe found the frontal lobe in 
men of learning larger than in common working men. 

The frontal lobes are centres of inhibition. When impulses 
cease to be controlled by mentality the passions reign unbridled. 

As what one does must alter his brain shape, it can be con- 
ceived that a musician would have a special development of brain 
and his reasoning centers in the forehead would be connected 
strands concerned in music, such as his hearing center being 
large and associated with his optic recognition of musical notes 
w r ith his artistic brain records. The mechanic would have hand 
centers developed more in the brain, an editor would have special 
growth of the writing center, connected with his pen hand. 

A large lower jaw or mastiff mouth denotes resolution, deter- 
mination, and belongs to heads that have made a noise in the 
world, showing that while originally a large jaw and its asso- 
ciated muscles could have been best adapted to fierce carniverous 
habits, it does not denote mere brutality in a man, for it can be 
subordinated by a large brain. The relations of the brain as a 
regulator of the viscera might suggest that rapacity and want of 
consideration for others could be associated with special develop- 
ment of centers for intestines in the brain, but a more important 
factor would be the faulty intellect, either in memory, associa- 
tion, imagination, or defective inhibitory or higher reasoning 
powers, which leaves the original animal rapacity merely changed 
as to the kinds of things grabbed for, the intestinal centres 



EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN. 439 

being those for acquisitiveness primarily, and later civilization, 
merely facilitating moans for the ultimate ingestion. 

foseph Jastrow 24 sums up the difficulties and advantages of 
the comparative method, dwelling upon many of the lower ani- 
mal- being more fully developed at birth. ''With such creatures 
as the cod fish, the turtle, or fly catcher, there is nothing that can 
be called infancy." (Fiske.) He refers to Spalding's observa- 
tion of chickens who from the shell follow the movements of flies 
and accurately pick at them. Man, Jastrow notes, attains his 
high intellectual position by entering the world the most helpless 
of living kind, but because less freighted with the ingrained* 
habits of his ancestors, is he freer to develop habits of his own. 
"It is babyhood that has made man what he is." (Fiske.) 
Motherly devotion and affection, fatherly interest and supervi- 
sion, extend over a larger and longer period as the species is more 
and more highly developed, until among the highest races of man 
it continues in a modified form through life, and in this modified 
form contributes to the development of the sentiments of kinship, 
family pride, altruism, and many social virtues. Thus human 
superiority can be referred to the infant entering life in a much 
less mature condition than the young of other species. 

In Africa, Herbert Spencer observes, the children are absurdly 
precocious and sharp under puberty, and that period, as with the 
Hindoos, appearing to muddle their brains, when their ability to 
receive new ideas appears to be lost. The Sandwish Islanders 
are quick at learning, but are poor thinkers. The New Zealand- 
ers are in the first ten years smarter than English boys, but not 
afterwards. 

Primitive people are more like one another than are individ- 
uals of a higher mental type, and there is greater individuality 
among the educated than the uneducated. This lack of pliability 
and of independence and prolonged education results in rigidity 
of customs, thought and habit, and the keeping up of meaning- 
less customs and an unyielding conservatism. 

Comparing infant and animal traits he refers to the playful- 
ness of children and kittens. Curiosity, inventiveness, dislike of 

24 Popular Science Monthly, Nov., 1892, p. 35. 



44© THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ridicule, love of being fondled, craving for attention, with jeal- 
ousy and anger when neglected, the ability to distinguish persons 
even though the dress is changed, the difference between visitors, 
beggars and friends of the family. Also the savage and childish 
peculiarities are often alike. In both the savage and child there 
is instability of character, impulsiveness, an easy and quick tran- 
sition from one series of emotions to their opposites, violent pas- 
sion upon slight provocation, with intense pleasure in trifles, joy 
in brilliant and startling sense impressions, a narrow range of 
susceptibilities, with the self-centering emotions of fear, anger, 
jealousy, vanity prominent. 

A child in pain is appeased by candy, its anger forgotten in a 
new picture book. Attention is attracted by a single object until 
fatigued. Merriment is similarly savage and childlike. Spencer 
speaks of the savage having the mind of a man and passions of a 
child, or exhibiting his adult passions in a childish manner. Both 
have difficulty in pronouncing certain sounds, inaccuracy of artic- 
ulation, a skipping of parts of sentences, etc. 

"The mind of the savage," says Sir John Lubbock, "like that 
of the child, is easily fatigued and will then give random answers 
to spare himself the trouble of thought." 

Galton tells of the Damara who never generalizes and who, 
"knowing a road perfectly from A to B and B to C, would have 
no idea of a straight cut from A to C ; he has no map of the 
country in his mind, but an infinity of local details." He watched 
a Damara trying to understand that twice two made four with- 
out being able to do so, and at the same time a spaniel trying to 
make out whether all her six puppies w T ere present. The dog 
and savage were about alike in ability to count properly. 

In the decay of the mind also the law is that the latest, least 
firm acquisitions are first lost, and the older, more deeply im- 
pressed, more primitive memories are longest retained. Gesture 
language remains when spoken language is diseased or lost. 

Again, idiots resemble a continuance of infancy in some re- 
spects, a tenacious, mechanical memory at times, they delight in 
sense impressions, mimicry of noises, cruelty, and the like. 



CHAPTER XIII. 
THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 

There is nothing in the intellect that has not reached it 
through the senses (Aristotle), is a saying both time-honored 
and justified. The functions of sensation are to indicate changes 
in the environment, to symbolize reality, to stimulate higher 
activities and prompt the formation of complex conceptions. 
Sensation may be approximately defined as a resultant of exter- 
nal impressions. 

A sensory impression involves a sending in of shocks from the 
outward organ, such as the eye or ear, to the brain, and a definite 
adjustment of the conducting paths and receiving apparatus must 
occur, and in addition some sort of a motor reflex act follows ; 
that is, some muscles are excited to move, though the excitement 
may be arrested in what is known as inhibition or checking, and 
in addition every sensation and motion affects the blood distribu- 
tion, so that sensations are not simple matters in their results. 
Blood is attracted to the route of the sensation, and when often 
repeated the sensation will cause a definite action of blood ves- 
sels to resupply the waste caused by the action of the center and 
nerves. 

A tree is recorded in the visual part of the brain, not as a pic- 
ture, but by certain effects upon that part accompanied by blood- 
vessel action, and in addition to this there is the sensation experi- 
enced by the head and eye muscles, movements needed in seeing 
the tree. A very tall tree would add the eflfect of the head being 
thrown backward to see the high branches ; therefore, impres- 
sions, however apparently simple, are really compound, and en- 
gage considerably more than one part of the brain, or even more 
than one organ of the body. These conjoined records of mole- 
cular and molar movement make up the memory. 

So several senses, as that of touch, or the muscular sense, can 
t>e engaged in a single observation, as the sight itself and the 

441 



442 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

accompanying feelings of parts of the body moving at the same 
time, the nerve fibrils and blood vessels associating the centers 
of activity. 

Telegraph wires are traversed by vibrations of constant cur- 
rents, much as the animal nerves are assumed to be in movement, 
and the terminal mechanism remains undisturbed by the current, 
so far as signals are concerned, until interruptions in the passage 
of the current take place. When the operator breaks or destroys 
the currents for an instant at one end of the line, this break be- 
comes apparent at the other end in a movement of the relay arma- 
ture. The nervous system is readjusted constantly, so that what 
were stimulants at one time may cease to be so later. The miller 
sleeps in his mill, but awakes when the machinery stops. Light 
falls regularly upon the eye, but it is the interferences with light 
that we see ; partly deaf persons may hear best in a great noise, 
because the vibrations imparted by the noise enables changes to 
be appreciated. 

Vision or light has been defined as the color sense, the space 
sense, and as that ability to become aware of objects without 
apparent contact. 

In the visual perception of space there are degrees of dis- 
tinctness of retinal images, dim or clear, according to magnitude 
and distance, the image will be small or large, enabling judgment 
of distance. 

Kepler in 1604 explained the structure of the human eye and 
traced the causes of imperfect vision in the converging of rays 
of light before and behind the retina. That is, the lines of vision 
met too soon or too late to be properly concentrated upon the sen- 
sitive part of the eye, through the eyeball being too long or too 
short. Kepler's laws of the planetary movements place him far 
in advance of all previous astronomers. 

The notion that birds have dull senses and that sight is their 
main sense appears to be a mistake, as their hearing is acute and 
they can smell as well as dogs. 1 Men differ among themselves 
as to acuteness of sight, out-door occupation sharpening this 
ability. The Tartars are said to be remarkably keen in eyesight. 

The pigment spots in worms are rudimentary eyes. Light 

1 M. X. Raspail, Smithsonian Reports, 1897, p. 367. 



THE SENSES AND PEELINGS. 443 

tit about the primitive irritability from which sight was 
developed. By degrees of bleaching of the pigment of the retina 
Stimate colors, between red and violet the rapidity of light 
vibrations is 392 trillion to 757 trillion vibrations per second. 
Such physical motions themselves are not sent to the brain, but 
are translated into nerve vibrations which the brain further com- 
prehends as having cfme from a special sense organ. All sensa- 
tion is a motion of particles striking the protoplasm or cell and 
accessory organs adapted to such purpose, as terminal rods, hairs, 
etc.. in insects and other animals. Sensations impress us by their 
different velocities, modified in their transmission to the brain, 
and an excellent demonstration of this appears in the softness of 
the auditory and hardness of the optic nerves, hearing being con- 
cerned with coarse movements, and sight with extremely fine 
ones. 

The wave lengths passing over the optic nerve are interrupted 
by acts of vision ; for instance, when the sunlight is obstructed by 
an intervening object the colorless impression may be made upon 
the retina, but when colors are seen a chemical substance called 
rhodopsin bleaches in the order of yellowish-green to red. 2 Ac- 
cording to Boll, light perpetually destroys the retinal color and 
darkness regenerates it. Thus in the space of a wink regenera- 
tion occurs, and the constant voluntary and involuntary move- 
ment of the eyeball enables a large number of the rods and cones 
of the retina to be engaged, affording time for regeneration of 
such as are not being used at the instant. The color blind are 

In the Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society, V. iii, No. 1, p. 63, 
from Arch. Mikr. Anatomie, xvii, p. 58, 1879, is a diagram of a visual and 
another of an acoustic segment compared. The eye and ear of the highest 
animal is here divested of all such accessory appendages as cornea, iris 
and crystalline lens, pinna, tympanum, ossicles and labyrinth. In each seg- 
ment the nerve dilates into a nerve cell which is followed by a protoplasmic 
visual or acoustic cylinder in which are an anterior and a middle nucleus 
and a rod-like body in direct connection through the ganglionic corpuscle 
with the nerve. The acoustic cylinder is continued into a nucleated body 
which though not separated from the cylinder by membrane seems to an- 
swer to a cell of the vitreous body of the eye. A visual segment of Buthus 
and acoustic of Acridian are represented in the diagrams. 

ingee, Physiological Chemistry of the Animal Body, p. 465. % 



444 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

defective in these chemical impressions. Where the pigment 
fails to bleach or changes too rapidly, or too slowly, color aber- 
ration would be inevitable. When nutrition is interfered with, 
as by cutting off the circulation to visual parts, the color apprecia- 
tion would be lessened, and the necessity for the incessant to and 
fro movements of the eyeball are obvious in bringing fresh sets 
of retinal elements to bear upon the object seen. Were the eye 
held fast, without motion, its visual power would be weakened 
by over-exercise of one part of the retina. 

David Starr Jordan 3 observes that "There are certain powers 
possessed by childhood which grow weak or disappear with ad- 
vancing age or wisdom, until at last all recollection of them is 
lost. One of these is the ability to recognize shades of color in 
ideas or objects which can have no color at all. Now and then 
some trace of this power persists through life, and even in con- 
nection with some degree of maturity of judgment. It is then 
looked upon as a mild hallucination, provoking a smile of sym- 
pathy or of incredulity, but not regarded by the person himself, 
still less by his friends, as possessing any value or significance. 
Nevertheless such associations have a degrees of psychological 
interest. A chapter has been devoted to them in Francis Gal- 
ton's admirable work, 4 an interesting essay of Word Color has 
been very recently published by Prof. Edward Spencer, of 
Moore's Hill College. 5 

In his youth Prof. Jordan always associated the idea of color 
with letters of the alphabet. Of later years the discovery that 
other people recognized no such coloration came to him as a sur- 
prise. The letter R, for example, ahvays called up the idea of 
greenness, S recalled yellow, X scarlet, and so on through the 
alphabet. Some persons having a similar association do not 
attach the same colors to the letters. Other persons have had an 
association of color with sounds. Certain ones claim to play the 
piano by color, each key note corresponding to a color. Jordan 
tells of the occasional association of colors with taste. A young 
girl would say to her mother that this food "tasted so very yellow 

3 Popular Science Monthly, July, 1891. 

4 Inquiries into Human Faculty. 

5 Proceedings Indiana College Association, 1889. 



THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 445. 

that 1 cannot eat it." She was reproached for such eccentric 
notions and finally outgrew them. 

There may be several ways of accounting for such abnormali- 
ties : The color appreciation centers in the brain could be erratic- 
ally connected with the other sense centers that arouse these color 
imprsssions, or some cells and fibres that ordinarily respond to 
color impulses have been misplaced, but the greatest probability 
is that the child has unconsciously been impressed by certain 
colors at the time of learning the letters, possibly by a colored 
primer, by views of lawns, trees, flowers, etc., at the time of 
struggling with the retention of the symbol, or of the word con- 
taining the special letter that recalls the color. Still another view 
would be that by aberrant action the vibrations induced in the 
special sense nerve, or its terminal, aroused color-appreciation 
vibrations in the same terminals. But why should this sensitive- 
ness be confined to mere letters instead of objects in general? 
The most probable explanation seems in the association accident- 
ally of the letter or word and the color while learning the letters. 
This law of association is a powerful one, and explains many 
other matters equally mysterious otherwise. Even to the extent 
of inability to perform certain ordinary acts unless certain acci- 
dentally associated conditions were simultaneously experienced. 
Pupils have failed to pass examinations on subjects they had 
learned well because the usual room was not used during the 
recitation. 

H. E. XewelP mentions the instance of a New York physician 
having two patients with this faculty abnormal. One of them 
had a horror of all words in which the letters ch were placed, and 
the other had hysterics at a certain shade of blue. 

M. d'Abbadie, 7 on the peculiarities of numerical vision, led to 
a discussion in which M. Jacques Bertillon related that he con- 
nected deliberately and intentionally each number as he was 
taught with some object in the garden, and thus created an inde- 
structible association of ideas between the figures and plants. 
Fractions he associated with clock-face divisions, but, of course, 
restricted to factors of 60. 

6 The Color of Word?, Popular Science Monthly, Dec, 1887, p. 257. 

7 Proceedings Anthropological Society. Paris, 1886. 



446 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Such instances tend to prove that unconscious association 
through simultaneous impressions, received at the time of learn- 
ing the letters or numerals, is at the root of such queer matters. 
Memory is full of such unconscious relations and cause us to re- 
mark, "What made me think of that?" 

Hearing is a matter of vibrations sent through the air into 
the ear or striking the hearing organ of the animal, which in the 
case of the male mosquito is made of hair-like antennae on his 
head. Spaces judged by the ear, as well as directions and dis- 
tances, are apt to be very faulty, as association and inference 
have to be depended upon and mistakes are frequent. The qual- 
ities of sound are pitch or altitude, tone or timbre, volume or 
amount, loudness. The limits of pitch are the number of vibra- 
tions determining the place of a sound in the scale of music. Tone 
decides between music or noise, a matter of vibration character. 
Volume is the amplitude of the vibrations. Harmony, discord, 
resonance, by sympathy and fusion of sensations, with two noises 
making a silence, and the vast science of sound in general is 
usually merely touched upon by experimental psychologists and 
hardly noticed by the old-fashioned essayists on the mind. 

The primitive ear consists in a vesicle filled with small min- 
eral particles called otoliths, and supplied with nerve bundles dis- 
tributed in its walls. The reason for auditory hairs ending in 

Experimental psychologists decide upon space and color as the func- 
tions of vision. The colors being divided into three primary. The quality 
comprising intensity, saturation and tonality, the duration being larger 
than impressions as after-images show, and there being positive and nega- 
tive after-images. The color perceived is often affected by the particular 
part of the retina. Color blindness is for red or green. 

The strain of accommodation may affect judgment of space and that 
of convergence is concerned in magnitude and distance, the parallax of 
motion affords judgment of distance, and perspective that of either dis- 
tance or solidity, and landscapes are usually clear in the near and smoky 
or hazy in the far distance, and with binocular parallax distances are also 
judged. The distribution of light and shade affords judgment of form 
from experience and the artistic imitation of it produces the same effect 
All showing how composite impressions may be, and that many things be- 
side mere simple sensation are associated with every sensory act to enable 
us to profit by it, such as experience, comparison, muscular movements, 
blood conditions and operation of other senses at the same time. 



THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 447 

water is that they are related to the touch sense in fishes whose 
tufts of hair enable them to become aware of motions of the 
water. 8 

It is difficult to determine where one sense ends and another 
begins in the cases of touch and hearing, in low notes and me- 
chanical vibrations of about thirty per second both senses appre- 
ciate the same thing. A deaf person may accurately estimate the 
rhythm of the low notes of a piano through his touch sense. Sir 
John Lubbock has demonstrated the ability of lower animals to 
be affected by vibrations that are too high and too low for man's 
eyesight and hearing. Man has thus either lost or never pos- 
sessed faculties which other animals retain or may have devel- 
oped. Persons differ between themselves in their ranges. Most 
have an ear. only for notes to sixteen thousand vibrations per sec- 
ond, while the possible range is placed at thirty-eight thousand. 
At the same time, these rapid mechanical motions produce sounds, 
and these sounds are the lowest bass notes of music, .so that at this 
point we have ordinary motions, that produce visible tremors of 
the largest piano strings, converted into sound energy. If you 
strike the highest note on the piano the vibrations belonging to its 
sound are so fine as not to be seen, so that sound from bass to 
treble consists in a few vibrations to very many vibrations of the 
strings per second. The number of vibrations per second neces- 
sary to produce the lowest bass sounds heard by man is forty per 
second ; the higher notes may contain as many as 40,000 vibrations 
per second, the range being only to sixteen thousand in most per- 
sons. 

Sir John Lubbock 9 deduced from experiments on bees the 
inference that they hear the high overtones at or beyond the range 
of hearing of man. 

Weber's law as modified by Fechner states that every sensation has a 
certain intensity which can be more or less definitely measured in relation 
to stimulus. Sensation increases in intensity in an arithmetical ratio as the 
stimulus increases in a geometrical ratio. But the rule is approximate and 
has its limitations. Mathematics are thus used in psychology in an indirect 
measurement of sensation. 

8 Strieker's Histology, Max Schultze, p. 167. 
'American Naturalist, April, 1883, p. 449. 



44& THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

The special senses of taste and smell are associated 
in food discrimination to such an extent as to be often con- 
fused one with the other. As might be imagined, the simpler 
reflex organization of the lower invertebrates relating mouth mo- 
tions to these senses, grow more complex the higher the animal, 
until considerable brain tissue is concerned. For example, the 
infant wants to eat everything it sees, and its arm and mouth re- 
flexes respond to sight, smell, and taste in endeavors at swallow- 
ing everything visible, including its fist and the moon. Olfaction 
is the main food discriminating sense below the primates, the 
olfactory lobes at the base of many lower mammalian brains 
being very large. 

In 1884 I published the original view that the hippocampus 
major related the olfactory sense to the eating motions. The hip- 
pocampus major passes from the olfactory nerve roots backward 
and finally curls upward and forward to the post-frontal region, 
where are centres for the lips, tongue, and deglutitory parts gen- 
erally. The Huxley-Owen controversy over the hippocampus 
minor ended in the former demonstrating its presence in anthro- 
poid ape brains. The animus of the denial was to show a radical 
difference between "lower animals" and man in the absence of a 
cerebral part. 

I am not aware that any one has preceded me in announcing 
the probable functions of the hippocampi. The major is large 
and, in keeping with its size, must have subserved some very im- 
portant life relation, and what is more likely, considering its be- 
ginning and termination, its relationship to other brain parts, and 
its zoological distribution, than that it brought the smelling, tast- 
ing, and eating apparatus into cooperation. 

In man and the higher apes, the olfactory has given way to 
optic intelligence generally, and in judging of food wholesome- 
ness the eyesight is relied upon mainly, which would account for 
the obsolescing features of the major in man, and the absence of 
the minor below the apes. 

The minor projects into the occipital lobe in the region allotted 
to optic intelligence. The relative sizes of the hippocampi may 
be explained by remembering that millions of years may have 
been occupied by mammalia with olfaction as the main means of 



THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 449 

food discrimination in their evolution, and that relatively much 
less time has elapsed since the apes and man first appeared. The 
hippocampus minor develops as the optic sense becomes the supe- 
rior means of food judgment; and as the olfactory importance 
diminishes the hippocampus major degenerates. 

That the taste and olfactory centres are not definitely deter- 
mined depends, in my opinion, upon the intimate blending of these 
senses with motor eating centres, paralysis of which becomes so 
noticeable as to overshadow the sense loss, which latter may be 
overlooked or regarded as not necessarily an associated derange- 
ment. Lesion of the temporal lobes destroying the smelling sense 
may indicate no more than that olfactory fibres pass through those 
parts. Taste has reflex connections of a lower than cerebral na- 
ture that regulate many involuntary acts concerned in eating, but 
by association pretty extensive brain distributions are also con- 
cerned, more particularly optic, and the glosso-labial motor areas 
near the sulcus of Rolando. So we may say that taste and smell 
are more generalized than centralized through the brain, and that 
in man the smelling sense is losing importance. 

Notwithstanding the large size of the olfactory tract at its 
junction with the brain, the smelling centre has not satisfactorily 
been made out. There are many portions of the brain the func- 
tions of which have not been discovered because present methods 
of observation are insufficient. There are certain phenomena that 
follow upon injury of other portions, such as loss of sensation, 
elevation of bodily temperature, in coordination, vertigo, but as 
any one of these kinds of disturbances may be produced by injury 
to several different areas, strictly speaking we cannot regard such 
pathological processes as indicating physiological centralization. 

With smell, taste and sight direct stimulation is impossible. 
Stimuli are modified before being sent in. The organs transform 
the stimulus, probably chemically. In smell and taste we have 
external chemical agencies, in sight we have light as the cause of 
chemical disintegration in the sensory cells ; these processes in the 
cells, then, serve as the real stimuli. Taste, smell and sight are 
chemical senses, while touch, pressure and sound are mechanical. 
Different stimuli acting on the same end organ produced the same 
sensations. Thus mechanical and electrical stimulations of the 



450 THE EVOLUTION OE MAN AND HIS MIND. 

eye produce light sensations. Differences in qualities of sensa- 
tions are due to differences in processes in stimulations that arise 
in the sense organs, primarily in the character of the physical 
stimuli, and secondarily in the peculiarities of the receiving or- 
gans which are due to its adaptation to the stimuli. 

Democritus observed that pressure upon the nostrils inter- 
fered with his sense of smell ; when one has caught a cold the 
swelling of the membranes exerts this same pressure, and also 
cuts off the smelling ability. Smell depends upon odorous sub- 
stances striking the membranes of the nostrils, these odors having 
regular orbital rotations constant for each substance. What 
passes for the sense of taste is very largely in part or in whole the 
smelling sense; all the fine differences by which we distinguish 
the various wines, fruits and meats, depend mainly upon olfaction. 
Smell is developed more in dark races, also in ruminants, carniv- 
ora and the wild boar. It is of poor service to human beings, 
except as an aid to the sense of taste. The faculty differs greatly 
between persons, some children have been able to idntify people 
by smell. 

Taste stimulates the taste buds of the tongue through solution 
and chemical disruptions, rotations and impacts, though both 
touch and smelling senses are at times confused with tasting acts. 
Cold and heat impair the tasting ability. Taste appears to engage 
rapid contacts in a watery medium, and smell acts by allied rota- 
tion of particles striking the nose membranes. Taste is divided 
into primary qualities of sour, sweet, bitter and salty ; alkalinity is 
related to salty and metallic with sour; the alkaline is probably 
made up of salines, and sweet with metallic and saline. Sweet 
salines neutralize, and cause insipidity. Taste is thought to be 
antecedent to sight, from its apparent presence in low organisms 
in which vision has not developed. 

A muscular sense has been suggested for some reasons, and 
denied by most physiologists as merely a form of the ordinary 
touch sense. Even admitting its existence, its nature is still ob- 
scure, owing to the confusion of sensations accompanying muscu- 
lar action with the notion of ordinary sensation, and the ambigu- 
ity of the terms consciousness of motion and motor conscious- 
ness, sometimes confused with the consciousness "initiating" mus- 



THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 451 

Clllar action ; so sensation, motion and consciousness arc confused 
in talking of muscular sense. The facts to explain the matter lie 
in active movement, the consciousness of effort and great discrim- 
inative ability. The theories consist in that of touch, the epi- 
peripheral ; that of muscle pressure upon nerves, the ento-periph- 
eral ; and the theory of effort-feeling, the central motor theory. 

According to Wundt, the "general sense" precedes all others 
and belongs to all beings endowed with mind. It includes not 
only the external skin and the adjoining areas of the mucous 
membrane, but a large number of internal organs supplied with 
sensory nerves, such as the joints, muscles, tendons, bones, etc. 
The general sense includes four specific, distinct sensational sys- 
tems : sensations of pressure, heat, cold and pain. There may be 
mixtures of these by one stimulus, as heat and pain, or pressure 
and pain. The four systems are homogeneous. Pressure sen- 
sations from the skin, joints, etc., are grouped as touch sensa- 
tions, and are distinguished from the common sensations, which 
include sensations of heat, cold and pain, and those sensations 
■of pressure that sometimes arise in the other internal organs. 
This relates to ideas and feelings, and not to qualities of sensa- 
tions themselves. Heat, cold and pressure internally are only ex- 
ceptionally felt under abnormal conditions. On the other hand, all 
parts of the skin and mucous surface adjoining are sensitive to 
stimulation of pressure, heat, cold and pain. The degree may 
vary so that the same place is not alike for all sensations. Sensi- 
tiveness to pain is about the same everywhere, at the surface or 
just beneath. But certain points of the skin appear to most favor 
stimulation for heat, cold and pressure; these are pressure spots, 
heat spots and cold spots ; spots of different modes do not coin- 
cide. Still, temperature spots always receive sensations of pres- 
sure and pain as well, and a pointed hot stimulus applied to a cold 
spot always causes a sensation of heat, while hot spots and cold 
spots react with their adequate sensation to properly applied me- 
chanical and electrical stimuli. Pressure and pain are not rela- 
tive to each other or to the two temperature sensations. These 
heat and cold sensations are not only different but contrasted. 
Pressure and heat, pressure and pain, cold and pain, may exist as 
mixed sensations ; hot and cold exclude each other because the 



452 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

only possibilities for a given area of skin are a sensation of heat, 
or one of cold, or an absence of both. As no end organ has been 
discovered in the skin for the determination of heat and cold sen- 
sations, it is quite likely that the blood or the blood vessels are 
the conveyors of the sense of heat and cold. An interesting 
question is, Why does extreme cold give the sensation of heat, as 
in handling liquid air, and why does the feeling of heat come to 
the person who is freezing to death ? Heat is induced by an ar- 
rest of motion. After running we experience the heat sensation. 
Extra activity of the circulation gives a feeling of heat, and a 
fever is accompanied with a rapid pulse. An ability to appreciate 
degrees of heat would be important to animals generally, fishes 
would be enabled to judge of localities such as the gulf stream, 
and the reptiles of the far-off ages in the hot seas did not need 
internal heat generation and must have been made uncomfortable 
by the ice-cold polar or glacier waters. Heat feeling must have 
been a very early sense, and connected with visceral reflexes, so 
that the sympathetic nervous system would be more involved in 
modifying conditions of organs through heat reflexes than the 
cerebro-spinal nerves. AH parts of the body may appear involved 
in fever recognition, but how is a hot point on the surface made 
known ? Is it through the vessels, the blood or the nerves ? 

The Touch Sense is the most general, the most rudimentary 
and the earliest to appear in the scale of life. When all other 
special sense faculty is lost, the touch, or tactile, sense may remain 
and be the only link between the brain and the outer world as a 
means of education. There are nerves to convey the sense of 
touch, pain and to enable us to feel heat and cold. From the fact 
that these sensations are so very relative, cold being merely the 
absence of heat and heat being the absence of cold, and what is 
cold at one instant may be hot at another, and our appreciation of 
either heat or cold being so dependent upon external or internal 
influences, it seems surprising that one set of nerves would not be 
enough to carry inward both sensations. A physicist would be 
likely to jump to the conclusion that one set of nerves would suf- 
fice, but our theories often are jarred by newly discovered facts. 
The surface of the body is abundantly supplied with little bulbs 
which are concerned in receiving contacts to send nervous im- 



THE SENSES AND PEELINGS. 453 

pulses inward to the brain. But these end organs are unequally 
scattered about the person, for in places, such as the back, a pair 
of carpenter's compasses gives the sensation of only one point 
pricking the skin, when two points may be doing so several inches 
apart, while on the tip of the tongue or end of the fingers these 
sharp points may be felt as two separate pricks, even though a 
small fraction of an inch apart. It is the same with the heat, cold 
and pain senses, for some parts of the body are acutely sensitive 
to such feelings, while other portions are dulled to them. 

Democritus claimed that all the senses were modifications of 
the sense of touch, and modern science upholds this view, as it ap- 
pears biologically the touch sense was the first to be developed, 
and the other senses proceeded from it by evolutionary refinement 
of outer-end organs. 

In the lowest forms of life, where there is no nervous system, 
every movement of the animal parts, however coarse or fine these 
parts or movements may be, practically constitutes sensation in 
the animal, and this connection between mind and body, the men- 
tal and physical life, exists much more in the highest animal life 
than is sufficiently recognized. The various forces of nature 
which may affect living things, as w 7 ell as things which do not 
live, may be arranged in serial manner. Visible ripples in the 
water up to the great waves of the ocean, with every sort of mo- 
tion greater than these, include mechanical force or energy, and 
ripples or movements of any substance down to thirty, forty, fifty, 
or a few more movements per second, could also be included 
among mechanical motions, force or energy. Xow, while with 
the ear we may appreciate forty movements per second and forty 
thousand movements per second, with the touch sense impres- 
sions made slowly, one to forty per second, distinct and separate 
feelings are caused, but with more rapid impressions there is a 
mere sensation of roughness, as in passing the hand over velvet 
or the fine down of a peach. If the contacts are more numerous 
than 1,400 per second the sense of roughness disappears and a 
smooth sensation is felt. 

Pressure may be felt on skin not supplied with nerves and 
sound vibrations may be transferred to the auditory nerve even 
after the auditory organ is removed. 



454 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

To some degree the touch sense may compensate the loss of 
sight in the blind, and hearing may also do so, but Galton thinks 
this is greatly overrated. There are special organs in the regions 
of the body most sensitive to pressure, but their structure ren- 
ders it probable that they merely favor the mechanical transfer 
of the stimulus to the nerve endings. Special end organs for hot, 
cold and pain stimuli have not been found at all. Space percep- 
tions through the touch sense consist in those of pressure or re- 
sistance, and those of motion or movement. The perception of 
direction is by localization of points touched and by discrimination 
with experience as guide. The tactile hair sense of man is sepa- 
rate from the general touch sense. Considering the remarkable 
sensitiveness of some plants to contacts, the fly-catching carniv- 
orous plants, and other seeming analogies between the animal and 
plant life, an added significance is given to the following words 
of Darwin, with which he closes his memorable work : "We be- 
lieve that there is no structure in plants more wonderful, as far 
as its functions are concerned, than the tip of the radicle. If the 
tip be lightly pressed, or burnt or cut, it transmits an influence to 
the upper adjoining part, causing it to bend away from the af- 
fected side; and, what is more surprising, the tip can distinguish 
between a slightly harder and softer object, by which it is simul- 
taneously pressed on opposite sides. If, however, the radicle is 
pressed by a similar object a little above the tip, the pressed part 
does not transmit any influence to the more distant parts, but 
bends abruptly toward the object. If the tip perceives the air to 
be moister on one side than on the other, it likewise transmits 
an influence to the upper adjoining part, which bends toward the 
source of moisture. When the tip is excited by light * * * 
the adjoining part bends from the light; but when excited by 
gravitation, the same part bends toward the center of gravity. In 
almost every case we can clearly perceive the final purpose or 
advantage of the several movements. Two, or perhaps more, of 
the exciting causes often act simultaneously on the tip, and the 
one conquers the other, no doubt in accordance with its import- 
ance for the life of the plant. The course pursued by the radicle 
in penetrating the ground must be determined by the tip; hence 
it has acquired such diverse kinds of sensitiveness. It is hardly 



THE SENSES AND PEELINGS. 455 

an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed, 
and having the power of directing- the movements of the adjoin- 
ing parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals ; the brain 
being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving im- 
pressions from the sense organs, and directing the several move- 
ments.' 1 " 

In discussing the Feelings, C. L. Herrick 11 suggests that 
changes in blood pressure may occur which now produce no di- 
rect sensations, but which operate indirectly on the reflexes asso- 
ciated with emotions. That is that instead of a localizable sensa- 
tion the stimulus finds its way to our consciousness in a form 
which we term pleasure or pain, anger or fear. Even the repro- 
duction of a painful event may cause a variety of delicate and 
indescribable thrills with waves of contraction passing through 
various regions of the trunk and limbs. The impulse to hug, 
squeeze and press objects associated with tinglings and strong 
jaw contraction which Prof. Herrick mentions is explicable very 
likely by Darwin's law of serviceable associated habit, in the for- 
merly useful clutching and carrying off movements being refined 
by civilization. The early localization of the affections in the 
bowels, he says, is founded on good physiological observations. 
He refers to Tuke's remark that by acting chiefly on the flexor 
muscles, fear causes the general bending or curving of the frame, 
as the hedgehog does, while courage contracts the extensors and 
produces expansion and height. The opposite state of relaxation 
occurs in terror. Calmness is marked by a gentle contraction of 
the muscles, indicative of repose, but at the same time of latent 

R. Wagner was the first to broach the supposition that the pale fibres 
in the Pacinian bodies and in the electric organs were sheaths with axis 
cylinders, and that the processes which pass into nerve fibres were them- 
selves bare axis cylinders, and, moreover, that the entire granular con- 
tents of a nerve cell are nothing but an axis cylinder enlarged into a globu- 
lar form. A. Kolliker, ed. by J. DaCosta, 1854, p. 355. 

Scruff says (same page) that the paths in the spinal cord for the con- 
duction of sense impressions of touch are in the posterior white columns, 
while the tracts for the conduction of painful impressions are in the gray 
matter of the cord. 

]0 Darwin, Power of Movement in Plants. 

"Journal of Comparative Neurology, Sept., 1892, p. 113. 



456 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

power, by the countenance free from furrows, but not relaxed 
into weakness. Anger induces more or less rigidity of the mus- 
cles generally. 

As a feeling is produced in an organ and is diffused toward 
the brain and cord, as in the case of erotism, there can be no cen- 
tres in the brain for a feeling or sentiment, as the same tracts and 
consciousness may be concerned in another feeling at anothei 
time. The periphery alone differentiates feeling, and the end or- 
gan is the only centre. The kind of feeling, its degree, rapidity, 
etc., that is characteristic of the end organ is felt in consciousness. 
There are no centres in the brain for certain groups of feeling. 
For example, a voluptuous feeling arises in the genitals and mem- 
ory of it is transmitted to the brain over the same tracts as other 
sensations and feelings. The organ is the seat of the correspond- 
ing sense. Decidedly in the eel, and in prior and subsequent 
forms, this erotic instinct modifies action, but as its brain influ- 
ence is in the line of pursuit and motions similar to other prehen- 
sile acts no special seat in the cerebrum can be found for it. Bit- 
ings, embrace, etc., show that the same tracts are stimulated. 
Many of the differentiated feelings, sentiments, emotions, etc., 
are close to their bases, which are easily recognized when circum- 
stances lop off the superstructure. But the obscuration of words 
leads the mind away from fundamentals. The feelings cannot be 
freed from intellect, while sensation and perception are the lowest 
forms of the connection of feeling and intellect. Where action is 
automatic feeling does not exist as in the case of visceral move- 
ments. 

Sensation may be graded through small differences all the 
>vay from no sensation at all to where it is so intense as to cause 
pain which, if continued, may destroy the nerve. Two persons 
may be equally able to hear the same faint sound and be pained 
by the same loud sound, and yet differ in the grades of hearing, 
according to low or high organization. An artist may see differ- 
ences of tint better than others, but cannot therefore see in the 
dark or stand strong sunshine any better than others. Musicians 
may not hear faint sounds nor be startled by loud ones. A me- 
chanic with rough hands may have developed a special touch 
ability useful to his work. Idiots have blunt touch sense. Men 



THE SENSES AND KEEEINGS. 



457 



have more delicate powers of discrimination than women, accord- 
ing to Galton. 1 '- 

As hunger is a primitive sense and a form of pain all pain 
may be considered as expressing hunger, but if appeased it means 
pleasure. Fear in one of its primary states is the fear of hunger, 
whence other fears are derived from association. Combativeness 
and destructiveness are associated with hunger appeasing. Curi- 
osity is based upon a search for food and the higher curiositv 
such as is shown in a desire for knowledge is an expression of the 
need of exercise of faculties and organs originally devoted to 
more primary purposes. Play is a need of exercise of the senses. 
So, in the evolution of the brain, hunger appeasing senses and 
emotions would have the first place. We see the large number 
and great size of the organs necessary to provide for appetite, 
and the nervous system that relates these organs together and the 
brain on top of all is, in the main, devoted to eating and to enable 
the animal to get food to eat. These facts are completely lost 
sight of by the old school metaphysician, although they are so 
apparent as to merely need mention. Therefore, the centres of 
the brain are largely related to the purely selfish, though neces- 
sary, matter of eating and procuring food. This gives us a start- 
ing point in considering the functions of the brain and how they 
have evolved. 

Emotions have no centres, as the feelings are general, but 
there can be centres for motion, and special senses and many in- 
tellectual functions are merely hunger appeasing abilities in their 
last analysis. 

Consciousness is requisite in pain appreciation as well as any 
kind of feeling. The suppression or blunting of consciousness 
notoriously suppresses or blunts pain. The cognizance of pain 
being a cerebral process involving consciousness, cutting off the 
route to the brain by which pain is conveyed to consciousness dis- 
poses of the pain, but not of the cause originating it. Too many 
pain alleviators are mere deadeners of sensation. The inebriate 
"drives dull care away" with his dram, but awakes to a realization 
of having intensified his troubles by the means adopted to escape 

,! Inquiries into Human Faculty. 



45$ THE EVOLUTION OK MAX AND HIS MIND. 

them. Schopenhauer holds that pains are positive and pleasures 
are negative experiences ; that pleasures are due to the absence of 
pain and the intensity of one is often in proportion to the other 
feeling that preceded. Susceptibility to painful impressions in- 
creases with development of the nervous system in the ascending 
scale of life from lower animals to man and in the ratio of intel- 
lectual growth, and enjoyments are correspondingly multiplied 
and intensified. The pains and pleasures of the intellect are both 
quantitatively greater with its development. 

The major anesthetics act upon pain by extinguishing con- 
sciousness in general, other chemicals arrest the pain consciousness 
alone, and in rare cases ether and chloroform have unexpectedly 
allowed intelligence to be preserved during the painlessness in- 
duced by them, while intermediate states between total and partial 
abolition of consciousness occur from insufficient anesthesia, to 
that which is called the surgical degree. Shock to the nervous 
system is more likely in the former case, and it sounds strange 
to say that, other things equal, death during an operation is more 
likely to occur from imperfect than from full anesthesia. 

The philosophic claims of pleasure being not only antithetical 
to pain but due to pain absence, finds justification in the universal 
prevalence of care, which is essentially a painful state, and the 
fools' paradise to which the drunkard is conveyed by his anesthetic 
alcohol. Further, in paretic dementia there are both physical and 
mental anesthesia ; the tactile sense impairment, akin to what is 
found in locomotor ataxia, is accompanied by the loss of care, 
indifference to what would otherwise cause grief, or other de- 
grees of mental pain. The consequence is the feeling of well 
being, bienfaisance, and upon this is erected the "delusion of 
grandeur'' which takes the direction of assertions of great wealth, 
strength, or powerfulness in some form, according to the ideals 
usual to individuals of different classes. So paretic dementia and 
the complacent megalomania stage of paranoia may be put in the 
category of pathologic mental anesthesias, all the more properly 
as both disorders indicate impending total destruction of the or- 
gan of the mind. Many bodily functions, such as digestion, 
assimilation, etc., are unfelt, conveying nothing of their workings 
to consciousness until some fault in their process renders them 



THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 459 

apparent ; induces discomfort, anxiety, or pain. Interference with 
customary nerve action may ; under certain conditions, be the basis 
oi painful sensations. In all life relations that which occasions 
the least effort impresses consciousness least. Changes from 
usual experiences may entail effort, greater expenditure, more 
labored heart and blood vessel impulses ; more heat is evolved, 
tissues are consumed and require more repair than usual. Mosso 
shows that thought is no exception to the rule, for blood pres- 
sure and temperature are raised in this kind of brain activity, and 
the wear and tear of cerebral structures in worry, grief, anxiety, 
can be as actual as from some mechanical destruction such as a 
tumor or direct injury could induce. Effort of any kind has in 
it the constant menace of pain, and relaxation the promise of re- 
lease therefrom, though inactivity sometimes may also become 
painful if maintained by effort. Life itself is activity, whether in 
rest or in labor. Molecular or mass motion must proceed in vary- 
ing degrees, asleep or awake, toiling or recuperating. And the 
law of relativity complicates considerations of activity and inac- 
tivity by making effort and rest impossible to classify under all 
conditions. "What would be labor to one person is not such to an- 
other. Ease to one individual would be torture to another, and 
accompanying circumstances may convert what would be pleasure 
at one time into pain at another. Pain also is relative, for a cer- 
tain nervous molecular activity may be over-stimulation in one 
person and normal in another. For the proper maintenance of 
nerve function there must be continuity of the conducting organ, 
a normal degree of pressure thereupon not to be exceeded ; heat 
above a certain level and within definite limits ; a suitable supply 
of nutritive material usually secured from the circulation, and 
that it should be suitable refers to both quality and quantity. 
Pain may result from interrupted continuity, from irritation or 
pressure upon nerves or their centres, from heat or cold extremes 
and from defective nutrition, provided that the sensory portion of 
the nervous system is not disabled from conveying intelligence of 
such changes to consciousness. Great organic destruction may 
proceed unrecognized as such until the sensory nervous distribu- 
tion is in some way apprised ; so while pain may in a general way 
serve to warn of danger, it may fail to do so, or prove unreliable 



460 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

in making a great disturbance over an imperfect tooth while fail- 
ing to inform the drunkard of the slow destruction of his liver 
or brain. History also abounds in instances of universal hubbub 
* over trifles and apathy concerning matters of the greatest impor- 
tance. Hunger is a form of pain which disappears in the extrem- 
ity of starvation. One may freeze unawares but suffer acutely 
during warmth restoration. Local blood quantity may increase 
or decrease emotional, intellectual or sensory faculties. Nerve 
stimulants raise the spirits and make sensations keener. Seda- 
tives diminish mental pain as they do physical. Only broad gen- 
eralizations are practicable in determining what would be pleasur- 
able or painful, for so many modifying factors complicate both 
extremes of these sensations that experiences when repeated may 
fail to act as before, or pain may become pleasure or pleasure pain. 
And what would afford pleasure to one person may be annoying 
to others. The color blind and tone deaf persons are merely bored 
by what others enjoy. Dean Stanley actually suffered from lis- 
tening to music, yet Jennie Lind once told Max Miiller he paid 
her the highest compliment she had ever received. Stanley was 
very fond of Jennie Lind, but when she staid at his father's pal- 
ace at Norwich he always left the room when she sang. One 
evening Jenny Lind had been singing Handel's "I Know That 
My Redeemer Liveth." Stanley, as usual left the room, but he 
came back after the music was over and came shyly up to Jenny 
Lind. "You know," he said, "I dislike music ; I don't know what 
people mean by admiring it. I am very stupid, tone deaf, as 
others are color blind. But," he said with some warmth, "to- 
night when from a distance I heard you singing that song I had 
and inkling of what some people mean by music. Something 
came over me which I had never felt before, or yes, I had felt it 
once before in my life." Jenny Lind was all attention. "Some 
years ago," he continued, "I was at Vienna and one evening there 
was a tattoo before the place performed by 400 drummers. I 
felt shaken, and to-night, while listening to your singing, the 
same feeling came over me ; I felt deeply moved." "Dear man," 
she added, "I know he meant it, and a more honest compliment I 
never received in my life." What savages consider musical the 
civilized could not tolerate, and the untrained ear is wearied by 



THE SENSES and PEELINGS. 46 1 

classical music as is the untrained mind by discourse beyond or- 
dinary understanding. For this reason, as Herbert Spencer 
claims, wisdom always has appeared and always will appear to be 
folly to the ignorant. The special sense nerves have been ex- 
cluded by some physiologists from among conveyors of pain, but 
blinding light, disagreeable sounds, odors and tastes are analo- 
gous to tactile pains, and are induced by over-stimulation or other 
comparable interruption to the customary nerve workings. As 
frequently more than a single factor enters into the creation of 
pain and its exacerbations, the withdrawal of one of these ele- 
ments may modify or even relieve the suffering. For example it 
is told that a professor lectured through his hour unconscious of 
a cinder in his eye which made itself felt immediately afterward. 
Referring to the use of derivation such as blisters, hot foot baths, 
cathartics, etc., in relieving pain by reducing circulation in the 
painful part, enables the relief obtained by the professor to be 
explained as blood supply withheld from the point of irritation 
while the blood was contributing to brain functions. 

In paretic dementia and megalomania the false happiness en- 
gendered by the brain destruction, and the disappearance of hun- 
ger when dissolution is begun, may serve to explain the spes 
phthisica, or hopefulness of consumption, through blunted pul- 
monary afferent impressions. Thus the reverse of pain accom- 
panies anesthesia, or absence of sensation, and it is the thought- 
less who are gayest and freest from care. 

Lucretius, Seneca and Homer allude to what modern psychol- 
ogists call the luxury of grief (Spencer), pleasure in pain 
(Ribot), and the pleasure of pain (Boullier). There are pleas- 
ures derived in some morbid conditions from physical and others 
from moral pain. Jerome Cardan wrote that he could not endure 
existence without pain and he resorted to self-torture to secure 
enjoyment. Krafft-Ebing discusses such flagellants as a recog- 
nized type of sexual perverts. The melancholy of lovers (spoken 
of by an Irishman as "sweet pain"), that of poets and artists is 
included in pleasureable pains. Spencer ventures the explanation 
that the feeling is one of pleasure in deserving more than has 
been received. 

Depression of vital functions is involved in ordinary pain. 



462 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Melancholia is a "psychical neuralgia," according to Krafft- 
Ebing. The coupling of pleasure with what is beneficial and pain 
with what is detrimental, originated with Aristotle, but it is far 
from being a universal rule, for pain may be far more useful as a 
life-conserver than pleasure, and the latter may indicate dissolu- 
tion, while both may be associated in apparently outrageous fash- 
ion in pathologic instances. Susceptibility to pain may persist 
in spite of anesthesia, though analgesia is a common accompani- 
ment of loss of sensation. In locomotor ataxia anesthesia and the 
terrible shooting pains co-exist. Hyperalgesia can be considered 
as an aggravated hyperesthesia The zone of irritability parallel 
to that of anesthesia on the chest of one with spinal cord disease, 
can be explained by the hyperesthesia being due to central nerve 
root irritability as a forerunner of the more serious cause of the 
associated loss of sensation in the adjacent nerve distribution. If 
this irritability involved the blood supply reflex of the spinal cord 
gray matter, pain is intensified and is induced by ordinary stimu- 
lation of the implicated nerves. In "Comparative Physiology and 
Psychology" (1883), I detailed reasons for the existence of what 
could be called a "nutrient reflex," whereby blood was instantly 
impelled to localities in the body that had undergone waste 
through action, and were hence in need of repair. The mechan- 
ism consisted in an intimate association of the vaso-motor nerves 
with the cerebro-spinal nervous system as seen in the rami com- 
municantes running from the spinal to the sympathetic system of 
nerves and their ganglia. It is only by introducing nutrient re- 
flexes into consideration of all the higher vital processes that 
they can be even approximately understood. The regulation of 
the caliber of blood vessels, the swiftness of the current of blood 
and the amount supplied to parts in proportion to their needs in 
such parts, by a harmonious working of the vaso-motor nervous 
system with the cerebral and spinal, when carefully considered, 
clear up many an obscure point in nerve and brain physiology and 
consequently in psychology. Failure of this relationship will also 
account for pathologic phenomena explicable in no other way. 
Thus in hysteria, instead of proper vascular workings, blood is 
withheld from cerebral centers, giving rise to aphonia, deafness, 
blindness, etc., and when impelled to inappropriate parts an inver- 



THE SENSES AND PEELINGS. 463 

sion of the emotional exhibitions may result in pleasant impres- 
sions starting the weeping mechanism, and laughter following 
upon unpleasant impressions. Cramped vascular and other renal 
channels sufficiently account for hysteric urinary suppression, and 
relaxation of these parts induces the copious urina spastica, or 
vast quantities of limpid nrine, passed after a hysteric attack. 
Ordinary toothache induced by alveolar abscess is lessened by 
whatever draws blood from the painful part and is increased by 
hypermeia. The irritation of the carious tooth starts the pain, 
but the battle of the phagocytes and micro-organisms induces an 
increased blood accumulation, which by mere pressure may in- 
tensify the agony. Relief through evacuation of the abscess points 
to the blood pressure as the aggravator of the pain. When pain is 
relieved by a mental impression it can best be accounted for 
through derivation. Some other portion of the cerebral or other 
organ drains away the overplus blood, with corresponding relief. 
Some headaches dependent mainly, though secondarily, upon too 
much blood, or erratic blood distribution in the brain meninges, 
can be relieved by whatever will determine blood elsewhere, 
wmether by full or partial hot bath, a mustard plaster, a changed 
current of thought, or a mental impression. Conversely an 
anemic headache may disappear upon lying down or by heart 
stimulation. That the circulation participates in suffering either 
as a cause or consequence is readily observable. Congestion may 
induce tactile pain, offensive odors, ringing in the ears, flashes of 
light or perverted taste, according to the nerve distribution af- 
fected ; the extreme congestion can obtund or even cut off special 
sense apprciation, inducing anesthesia, deafness, blindness, inabil- 
ity to smell or taste, through pressure, and the opposite extreme 
of bloodlessness can set up identical defects. The old saying that 
"pain is the cry of the nerve for purer blood," is in a restricted 
sense true. Impure blood may induce pain through acting as a 
foreign substance and through reducing the quantity of blood 
proper. Pain may be the cry for less blood also. Headache from 
bad air is a toxemia, ordinarily relieved by fresh air. The insuf- 
ficient oxygenation renders this qualitative a quantitative condi- 
tion. Headaches caused by tumors, especially by grinding luetic 
headache, are through meningeal nerve pressure and irritation. 



464 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Similarly meningitis and injuries to the head that involve the 
brain and its covering, when inflammatory conditions follow, de- 
pend upon the vascular troubles associated with such inflamma- 
tions. Reducing the blood supply to the head modifies the pain 
and destructive processes. Irritation of ordinary sensory nerves 
suffices to cause pain, as when an amputation stump cicatrix in- 
cludes a nerve and neuromatous growths are formed. That the 
circulation contributes to the pain is evident through the desire 
to elevate the stump and by gravitating the blood therefrom allay 
the suffering. Normal irritation of nerves produces the feeling 
of general comfort, free breathing, and tactile impressions gener- 
ally. Hunger, thirst, malaise, horror, fatigue are due to nerve 
terminal irritation. Mechanical, chemic, thermal and electric 
stimulation may cause pain if transcending certain limits, or if 
intense enough may destroy sensation altogether, and beyond this 
the anesthesia dolorosa may appear. Pains are not always defin- 
itely located, through irradiation, or may be referred to the wrong 
source of origin, as when amputation pains are felt to be in the 
lost member. Varieties of pains are in proportion to the intens- 
ity of stimulus, and massiveness regards the number of nerves 
involved. Most of the differences described by the words pierc- 
ing, shooting, cutting, boring, burning, pressing, gnawing and 
acute, are due to the intermittent or continuous molecular changes 
in nerves or their centers, but the throbbing and dull pains usually 
owe their peculiarities to arterial or passive congestion. The 
headache known as angio-paralytic has been often relieved by 
pressure upon the carotid supplying the aching part and the 
angio-spastic kind should be treated by means calculated to re- 
lieve spasm, such as amyl nitrite inhalations. In the one case 
there is the hyperemic throbbing arterial impulse, and in the 
other intense constriction of vessels inducing localized anemic 
pains. In inflammatory affections of the skin hyperalgesia may 
be so extreme that a breath of air or a light touch produces pain. 
The blood superabundance in the nerve terminals here is plainl) 
the cause. The disordered sensations called paresthesias includ- 
ing chills and burnings, creeping, itching, formication, are re- 
lated to pains, and may become so intense as ot become such. 
Causalgia and Erythromelalgia are described by S. Weir Mitchell 



THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 465 

as burning sensations and reddenings due to central nerve irri- 
tations. Neuralgias, with shooting pains transmitted the length 
of the nerve affected, primarily or secondarily involve blood dis- 
tribution, and inflammation of nerve roots frequently give rise to 
neuralgias. The inflammation may not be the cause of the orig- 
inal disturbance, but even though produced by the same irrita- 
tion that induced the neuralgia it is an aggravating factor, and 
when this inflammation is controllable a step toward possible cure 
is taken. The structural commotion recognized as pain can only 
be maintained by blood presence, as nutrition is necessary for pro- 
longation of any vital phenomenon. When the vascularity of a 
point of irritation, such as the amputation end of a nerve, is re- 
lieved of blood supply by gravitation or pressure the pain is les- 
sened. Anesthesia often accompanies bloodless peripheral states 
and the numbness of freezing depends upon the constriction of 
blood vessels and other circulatory reduction in the frozen part 
which visibly whitens through being deprived of blood. 

Inflammation of a spinal nerve root or in the sensory neu- 
roglia of the spinal cord causes the lightning pains of neuralgias, 
ataxia and sciatica. Relief of the inflammation necessitates more 
than mere temporary alleviation of the pain, for the primary- 
cause of the irritation that induced the inflammation must be 
reached, and a destructive process in the nerve centres from 
chemic changes is too often beyond control. Among painful 
states associated with too much engorgement of nerves or their 
centres are all the hyperemic, congested or inflammatory cerebro- 
spinal disorders, such as some headaches, toothaches, neuralgias, 
ataxic pains, overheating, hyperalgesias and hyperesthesias. The 
opposite condition of relative bloodlessness occurs in cold, hunger, 
thirst, fatigue, pressure, anemic headaches and other painful 
states depending upon reduced blood volume. Blood poisoning 
by alcohol, septic matter, gases, etc., while qualitatively altering 
the blood for the worse, reduces the quantity of pure blood to parts 
and act as anemic factors, while the foreign substances ''irritate" 
the nerve centres. Uric acid crystals mechanically cause pain in 
the kidney tubules, ureters and bladder, and may reasonably be 
regarded as sensory disturbers elsewhere. Sodium urate depos- 
its in the joints exert painful pressure. In all these phases of 



466 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

suffering we observe an irritated part of the nervous system, 
bloodlessness or engorgement, associated with the pain, either as 
cause, effect or added factor. A toxic substance circulating in 
the blood, whether introduced from without or manufactured in 
the body, if denied proper elimination, as often takes place with 
uric-acidemia or other auto-intoxication, may irritate the vascular 
nervous control so as to produce contracted arterioles with in- 
creased arterial tension, a spastic condition observable in migraine 
and to an extreme in the frightful raptus melancholicus. In these 
disorders, irritation primarily and relative anemia secondarily, 
are at the foundation of the suffering, while as a consequence 
engorgement of other organs or parts of organs complicates and 
adds pressure, or congestive pains. Over-stimulation of nerves 
often produces over-stimulation of the circulation or even its 
practical paralysis, with localized hyperemia and resulting pain. 
In short all painful states may include the conditions of irritation, 
too much or too little nutrition, separately or combined, in vari- 
ous ways. These pain factors may be symbolically represented by 
the initials of irritation, hyperemia, anemia, to graphically illus- 
trate pain, however induced : Uric acid headache : I. A. ; the 
irritation causing the anemia. Chlorosis headache : A. I. ; the 
anemia causing the irritation. Cerebral congestion : H. I. ; the 
congestion causing the irritation. Over-stimulation : I. H. ; the 
irritation causing the hyperemia. These three conditions may be 
combined simultaneously or successively to produce very many 
apparently discordant pathologic states. Anemia in one part, 
however induced, may result in congestion in an adjacent part, 
and the pressure hyperemia may cut off nutrition from surround- 
ing points so that both hyperemia and anemia may occur in 
closely related parts, each condition adding its special influence 
to the total pain ; so the localized pain may have the formula I. A. ; 
I. H.; I. H. A. within a narrow area, or either H. or A. may 
cause I., and, further, the combination I. H. A. may set up inten- 
sified irritation ; the withdrawal of one factor serving to lower 
the pain intensity and paving the way to removal of the entire 
pain. Let I. be induced by an exposed nerve, H. follows with 
maybe A. in contiguous parts by pressure of blood ; now while 
the removal of H. by blood evacuation may reduce the aggravat- 
ing influence of blood pressure, which acts irritativelv, the most 



THE SENSES AND PEELINGS. 4^7 

sensible thing to do is to get at and remove the primary cause of 
the pain by protecting the nerve from exposure which sets up the 
hyperemia. If an abscess results from the phagocytic battle the 
septic advance adds further irritation, which must be disposed 
of in attempts to remove all causes of pain. A general blood 
condition may favor the production of pain by having within it 
the elements of disturbance ready to centralize upon a weak point. 
Analogous sociologic states exist. Peter the Hermit and Walter 
the Penniless were foci of irritation in the eleventh century, lead- 
ing up to the crusades in which two million Europeans were slain 
in two centuries. This blood letting finally carried off the dis- 
turbers and the disturbed, and, therapeutically, venesection has 
for ages been resorted to in pain relief, though derivation or the 
transfer of the disturbed circulation isnowadays preferred. A point 
of irritation may be starved out by keeping nourishment reduced, 
it may be evacuated at the expense of the blood, or it may be held 
in check by removal of the elements that nourish its fury, or, best 
of all, the focus sometimes may be directly destroyed by medical 
or surgical means. Far too often this latter process is impossible 
through inability to determine at the proper time just where or 
what the primary disturbing influences may be, or even if deter- 
mined there is in most cases inability to get at and remove the 
origin of the pain. But the safest rule to adopt is to attempt to do 
so if within possibility, and where relief of pain is imperative with 
no practical means of removing the cause only such agents should 
be resorted to that do not entail other and often greater disadvan- 
tages to the economy, sooner or later. Only such portions of the 
body as are supplied with sensory nerves relate consciousness to 
pain. Irritation of unsupplied parts may advance to various 
forms of destruction and until the sensory filaments are second- 
arily involved by extension, or through accompanying circulatory 
alterations, the warning which pain is supposed to afford is ab- 
sent. Several of the recently discovered synthetic compounds 
combine antipyretic with analgesic properties in different de- 
grees. Acetanilid, formerly known as antifebrin, has been too 
recklessly used. It depresses the heart dangerously and requires 
careful watch of its physiological effects. "Antikamnia" 18 has 
13 Helbing, Modern Materia Medica, p. 3. 



46S the evolution of man and iiis mind. 

been found to contain acetanilid, sodium bicarbonate, caffein and 
tartaric acid. In many such advertised preparations the possi- 
ble introduction of acetanilid should be regarded. Even external 
application of acetanilid, as has been suggested for antiseptic pur- 
poses, is dangerous. Pseudo-scientific compounds, mainly with 
acetanilid mechanically mixed with other substances, can be 
avoided by learning the status of their originators, manufacturers 
and clinical reporters. Antipyrin is incompatible with too many 
materials to enable its administration in combination with or- 
dinary remedies. Cesari's claim that it thickens and condenses 
the blood without coagulating it may account for its hemostatic 
properties and should be regarded in a study of its anti-neural- 
gic, antipyretic and other influences. Methyl chlorid as a spray 
produces local anesthesia through freezing the part to which it is 
applied. The visible whitening of the surface that occurs during 
its application indicates that bloodlessness is the cause of the 
sensory arrest. Paraldehvde is an unreliable sedative or hypnotic. 
Phenacetin or phenocoll have been successfully established as 
sedatives and are far safer than acetanilid or antipyrin. The sali- 
cylates and salol possess indirect slight analgesic properties, due 
to their antiseptic and anti-rheumatic tendencies, and dilute car- 
bolic acid blanches animal surfaces and produces local anesthe- 
sia. Cocain hydrochlorate likewise reduces blood circulation at 
the point of local anesthesia. Its fascinating temporary euphoria 
and later excitation of nerve centers are worthy of study among 
psychologic effects of drugs. Opium and its congeners are re- 
sponsible for legions of debauched habitues, most of whom date 
their addiction from incautious prescribing. The benumbing in- 
fluence of alcohol and opium upon the nervous system generally 
account for their exhilarant influence, on the principle of mental 
anesthesia inducing relative exaltation ; the relief from care, con- 
cern and painful memories being subjectively interpreted as hap- 
piness. The debased sensory apparatus of the paretic dement 
causes him to insanely ascribe his buoyancy and general good 
feeling to greatness or good fortune realized. Drugs that depress 
the motor apparatus mainly, such as conium maculatum, do not 
exalt the sensory field, rather the reverse, but many degrees of 
association between anesthesia, analgesia and exhilaration are ob- 



THE SENSES AND PEELINGS. 469 

Servable in other neurotic medicines. Opium primarily relieves 
pain, raises the spirits, then stupefies. Alcohol anesthetizes, ex- 
alts and ends in stupor. Chloral may benumb the nervous system, 
mildly exalt, then stupefy. Chloralamid, a much safer article, is 
mildly sedative, causes hypnosis, and the day following large 
doses a feeling of exhilaration is reported. Chloroform and ether 
■excite, and finally obtund consciousness. Oxygen gas exhilarates. 
Nitrous oxide gas first exhilarates, and then affects conscious- 
ness. The bromides depress the circulation, are mildly analgesic, 
and in over-doses stupefy. Ergot by constringing overloaded 
blood vessels may secondarily act as an analgesic. 

It has occurred to me that the physiologic chemistry of ma- 
teria medica could be appreciably advanced by tabulating the 
effect of graded doses, particularly of the recent cynthetic com- 
pounds, as to when the sedative, antipyretic, antiseptic and hyp- 
notic effects, if any, ensued, juxtaposed with their rational chemic 
formulae, their relative looseness or closeness of molecular con- 
struction and affinities, with their relations to temperature, solu- 
bility, etc. The rapidity or slowness of compounds to enter into 
new combinations under the conditions afforded by the bodily 
organs has greatly to do with the therapeutic effects. Antipyretic 
influence can be exerted through action upon the blood vessel 
tonus or the blood corpuscles, and in some instances upon the 
thermal brain centers demonstrated by Ott. Antisepsis can be 
conceived in such preparations as acting directly upon septic 
material or so modifying their products or the vital fluids as to 
lessen septic activity. Antagonism to fermentation is often prac- 
tically antisepsis. Analgesia can result from the direct influence 
of antiseptics upon irritative points susceptible to their influence ; 
from allaying some consequence of irritation such as an acceler- 
ated circulation which aggravates pain, and if pain is due to cir- 
culatory faults mainly or wholly this effect upon the heart, arter- 
ies, or blood tends to relief. The visible change in the blood ma- 
terials claimed by Cesari when antipyrin is given can readily be 
tentatively assumed as a cause of heat reduction, and incidentally 
pain alleviation. The rush of phagocytes to an irritated point is 
accompanied with accumulation of red blood corpuscles. Pain 
can not continue without the material that enables molecular 



470 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

activity, and this material is afforded by the blood and lymph. 
Drive away congestion and though the cause of the irritation 
may remain, its influence is lessened greatly, and the warrior 
wandering cells have better opportunity to attack the foreign 
material unless they also are driven from the field of battle. The 
pain of a "bone felon" is modified by holding the hand aloft ; the 
Esmarch's bandage anesthetizes by blood deprivation ; freezing 
anesthetizes similarly. Derivation may not be the means by 
which a disorder can be cured, but when blood accumulation in 
an organ is pathologic its distribution at least facilitates recovery. 

When the professor set his cerebral machinery in motion so 
that his brain required blood and withdrew it from the optic that 
was being irritated by the cinder, the pain was absent until the 
lecture was concluded. Similarly, the seat of consciousness can 
be affected by hysteric, erratic blood-vessel action, so as to pro- 
duce or terminate pain and paralysis through mental influence, 
and the pain suppression occasionally accomplished under hyp- 
notic conditions is undoubtedly of this nature, and the seat of 
consciousness may, through derivation of blood by physical or 
mental action, be similarly affected. The operation of the nutri- 
ent reflexes in connection with every nerve impulse should have 
careful regard by physiologists, and many a mystery would be 
thus disposed of. The association pi antiseptic properties with 
the analgesic and antipyretic in so many of the phenetidin com- 
pounds is also worthy of consideration. If such antisepsis is 
secured through a direct action of the medicament upon living 
plant and animal micro-organisms, within the varying degrees 
of arresting or destroying their vitality analgesia likewise could 
ensue from chemical lowering of nerve function, directly or 
through 'blood changes such as occur with antipyrin. 

So it ceases to be remarkable that a substance hostile to minute 
organisms, an antiseptic, should also act as an antipyretic and 
analgesic by chemically exerting control over such vital opera- 
tions as heat and pain production of higher organisms. These 
lessened molecular activities are exerted in different degrees by 
the different compounds ; some are too strongly antiseptic to be 
safely used as analgesics or antipyretics ; nevertheless the three 
properties are connected, notably in the case of carbolic acid, and 



THE SENSES .AND FEELINGS. 471 

to a safer therapeutic extent in the phenetidin derivatives. 

All the senses and emotions have their associated pains and 
pleasures. Strong light may pain the eyes (photophobia), due to 
a normal or abnormal sensitiveness, and we speak of a painful 
sight. Smells may pain, the very breathing may be painful. Sounds 
may pain by intensity, disagreeableness or association. The touch 
sense is pained bv a bruise or stroke. The operation of the senses 
may be attended with pain and with pleasure, but as a rule the 
pleasure is the negative, the absence of pain. In the absence of 
all mental pain and responsibility the insane person, especially 
the paretic dement, fancies he is enjoying pleasure. 

The atoms are blindly attracted and a state of tension or un- 
satisfied combination may be compared to pain, a gratified com- 
bination of pleasure. The ignorant are guided less by reason and 
more by palate and immediate desires. The subsequent experi- 
ences and growth of intelligence change likes and dislikes radi- 
cally. A child or ignorant person will eat a poisonous fruit be- 
cause it tastes pleasantly. Through instruction a dread of that 
same fruit may be imparted and the knowledge of poison deters 
the child from eating it. The difficulty of breathing, dyspnoea, 
stomach uneasiness, and intestinal distress, are among the most 
rudimentary and earliest of painful feelings. 

Happiness is a condition of mind often confused with the 
means of happiness. It is purely relative as shown by the tramp 
when presented with $10 being elated, and the wealthy person 
taking his life when his losses reduced him to $50,000 per year 
income. Bishop Butler claims that "happiness is the congruity 
between a creature's nature and its circumstances." Darwin sug- 
gests that some instincts are determined by fear or other painful 
feeling. Heredity may prompt to action without either pain or 
pleasure. A pointer cannot help pointing, hence pleasure or pain 
is not the incentive to actions in all cases. A habit may be blindly 
followed and cause disagreeable feelings if interfered with. Suf- 
fering is a universal rule in accomplishing anything. Effort must 
be made and it is often, not always, painful. Few changes are 
made for the better without it, mainly because a tearing up of 
old methods and running counter to some one's "rights" (usually 
to do wrong), or fighting some one's vested interests, raise oppo- 



472 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

sition and retaliation. The adjustment of inner to outer relations 
may entail pain as in electrical states and humidity changes be- 
fore equilibrium is attained, causing rheumatism and amputation 
pains to increase and neuralgias may be made worse for similar 
reasons. 

Lower animals feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, 
in varying degrees, according to the development of their sensory 
apparatus. 

To be satisfied is essentially repletion, in one way, and con- 
tentment in another. It may be associated with retrogression at 
times, through its inducing cessation of function, for effort is a 
main cause of development. The end of anxiety may also be 
recuperative, if it does not result in supineness. A poor man may 
become rich and fairly contented, but his riches in many ways 
may not prove beneficial. What would cause pain to a person 
may become a pleasure, later, or be regarded with indifference. 
Toleration for stenches and unpleasant tastes may be acquired or 
reconciled, as in eating a Java fruit or limburger cheese. De- 
composition odors are offensive by association and asphyxia ef- 
fects. Animals vary in their tolerance of sense impressions, 
especially odors, and have attraction to some very disgusting 
smells. Chinese and Arabian music is appalling to Europeans. 

The aged sometimes regret their past, as when young they 
yielded to temporary attractions regardless of future pain. It 
requires a high development to refrain from immediate enjoy- 
ment for the sake of others and the future. 

The savage and the revert may take pleasure in inflicting pain 
upon others, though quite capable of knowing what pain is. 

Dogs and apes resent being ridiculed or laughed at ; they 
keenly feel the degradation and try to protect themselves from it.. 

There is a pleasure on the part of the average person in feel- 
ing that one who was looked up to has been dragged down to the 
general level, because superiority is unwillingly acknowledged, 
and there is delight in degrading others. It is because of this 
that gossip and malice, uncharitableness and disparagement are 
so common. 

Note that when the weather bureau makes a wrong prediction 
of the weather many are happy in chattering of the fallibility of 



THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 473 

science, even though ninety per cent of successful predictions arc 
made unnoticed. The ignorant like to fancy that no one knows 
any more than they do. It elevates them in their own estimation 
above those who offend them with superiority. 

Dr. Lange, a Danish physician, first suggested that the or- 
ganic conditions with their various manifestations provoked by 
an internal or external excitation or by an idea, the appetites, 
needs, desires and inclinations are the primary elements in emo- 
tions and that the emotion itself is nothing but the revelation of 
these things to consciousness. Pleasure and pain follow the 
changes in the tendencies of the organism as the shadow follows 
the body. Where the normal person feels pleasure the abnormal 
may feel pain ; pathological conditions may pervert tastes and 
instincts ; bloodlessness, gout, rheumatism, dyspepsia, heart dis- 
ease and other diseases frequently cause such perversions of emo- 
tions. So consciousness is a mere spectator, and is not con- 
cerned in the making of emotions. Intoxicants, shower baths, 
chemicals, may paralyze the blood vessels and influence the de- 
gree of the emotion, so by suppressing the motor manifestations 
we also suppress the corresponding emotions. What the move- 
ments of the body and its apparatus express objectively con- 
sciousness expresses subjectively. Binet and others hold that 
pleasure is merely the consciousness of a feeling of complete 
equilibrium within the limit of the needs, tendencies and desires. 
Deviations by addition or subtraction produce the sensation of 
pain, a negative pain if above, and a positive pain if below the 
plane of satisfaction. There is no disagreeable or agreeable 
quality of a sensation, all depends on degrees of intensity. Every 
excitation, actual or revived, produces certain modification in the 
circulatory, respiratory and secretive systems. The nature of the 
interested organs determines the special character of the emotion 
which is produced, the intensity of the modification determines 
the agreeable or disagreeable tone of the emotions. The affective 
life is thus intimately related to the fundamental phenomena of 
organic life and primarily to motion. 

The pain of grief can be ascribed to the interruptions of nerv- 
ous and vascular workings to which we are regularly accus- 
tomed. Charcot cites an instance of the inability to grieve in one 



474 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

case being due to impairment of the visual centers. The mer- 
chant could form no idea (mental picture) to himself of how his 
friend appeared, and hence his sympathy was at a loss for a sub- 
ject upon which to exercise it. 

"He cried like a calf," is a remark sometimes heard. It is no 
disgrace for a calf to cry, and he sheds tears in quantities when 
his emotions justify them. It is even easier for him to cry than 
for many other animals, because his lachrymal apparatus is per- 
fect and very productive. Ruminants weep most readily. Hunt- 
ers have long known that a deer at bay cries profusely. The tears 
will roll down the nose of a bear when he feels that his last hour 
is approaching. The big, tender eyes of the giraffe fill with tears 
as he looks at the hunter who has wounded him. Dogs weep 
very easily. The dog has tears both in his eyes and voice when 
his beloved master goes away and leaves him tied up at home. 
Some varieties of monkeys seem to be particularly addicted to 
crying, and not a few aquatic mammals also find it easy to weep 
when the occasion requires it. Seals, in particular, are often 
seen to cry. Elephants weep profusely when wounded or when 
they see that escape from their enemies is impossible. The ani- 
mals here mentioned are the chief ones that are known to weep, 
but there is no doubt that many others also display similar 
emotion. 

In "Comparative Physiology and Psychology" I gave the 
derivation of weeping from associated serviceable habit of shed- 
ding tears to moisten eyeballs pained by dryness, fishes having 
their eyes bathed in water, and salt tears are developed later in 
batrachia. 

Schopenhauer holds it is the good which is negative, in other 
words happiness and satisfaction always imply some desire ful- 
filled, some state of pain brought to an end. Pain can be posi- 
tive because it means a tension of molecules, which relieved means 
pleasure, for a short while, but is followed by new desires, affini- 
ties and new molecular possibilities. 

"The pleasure in this w T orld outweighs the pain, or there, is a 
balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see whether 
this statement is true let him compare the respective feelings of 
two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other. 



THE SENSES AND FEELINGS. 475 

"< )ne with a soul above the common or a man of genius will 
occasionally feci like some noble prisoner of state, condemned to 
work in the galleys with common criminals, and he will follow 
his example and try to isolate himself." 14 

Happiness is best not sought, and then it comes unexpectedly. 
Those who seek it are chasing phantoms. Voltaire claims that 
happiness is but a dream and sorrow is real. So to live happily 
means to live a tolerable life — less unhappily. 

Relativity is evident in little things annoying when there are 
no great ones to do so, and when there are the little troubles are 
unfelt. 

In paretic dementia trifles annoy and serious matters do not, 
as the brain is degraded beyond reaching to the larger concep- 
tions, but remains irritable to the lesser. 

Some sayings that are worthy of study among multitudes that 
are accepted, but that will not bear close examination, are : 

The happiness we receive from ourselves is greater than that 
we obtain from our surroundings. 15 Men are not influenced by 
things, but by their thoughts about things. 10 The man born with 
a talent he is meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using 
it. 17 Many rich are unhappy because uncultured. What a man 
is contributes more to happiness than what a man has. The 
more a man has in himself the less inclined he is to company. 18 
Properly constituted people long for action and soon tire of 
leisure, not excepting the student who longs for what others call 
leisure to enable him to exercise his brain. 

Pain may be regarded as positive because it is based on a 
tension of unsatisfied molecules. When they are satisfied pleas- 
ure may be said to result, but this means new desires, new affin- 
ities and new molecular cravings. For this reason atoms, 
animals and men can never be satisfied, notwithstanding it is as 
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus says, that ''the greatest part of what 
we say and do is really unnecessary. If a man takes this to 

14 Schopenhauer, Essays on Pessimism. 
,: ' Metrodorus, a disciple of Epicurus. 

16 Epictetus. 

17 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister. 

15 Schopenhauer. 



47^ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

heart he will have more leisure and less uneasiness." The "Ar- 
cadian happiness and simplicity" were mere fables. 19 

David Hume remarks the relativity of pains and pleasures 
thus : "In all kinds of comparison an object makes us always 
receive from another to which it is compared, a sensation con- 
trary to what arises from itself in its direct and immediate sur- 
vey. The direct survey of another's pleasure naturally gives us 
pleasure, and therefore produces pain when compared with our 
own. His pain considered in itself is painful, but augments the 
idea of our happiness and gives us pleasure." The underlying 
explanation is in our selfish dislike that others should enjoy what 
we have not and our pleasure that others suffer more than we 
do. So the comfortable man looks out of the window upon the 
one in the storm and cold, as the wealthy complacently regard 
the poor as getting what they deserve, Divine favors being re- 
served for Baer and other coal barons. Exceptionally, where 
the secondary ego, the true altruism, is developed in rich or poor, 
this is not the case, and sympathy may persist under all circum- 
stances, but this is most often in the poor or in those like Pro- 
faasco, who impoverished themselves to help others. Ordinarily 
we comfort ourselves by knowing that others are either as badly 
off, or are worse off, than ourselves. 

In Comparative Physiology and Psychology I gave the origin 
of laughter as being from the eating motions, the deglutitive 
chuckle and gobble of the hogs and other animals, and that later 
association transferred the originally serviceable gobbling move- 
ments, which accidentally caused sounds, to expressions of allied 
content and satisfaction. The grunt of savage assent can be 
readily derived from his uncouth noises at meals. The ready 
laugh of the appeased infant at the breast shows the origin of 
this expression of happiness quite plainly. It has also under- 
gone inhibition so that it is not now manifested so readily except 
among the uncultivated. Man is by no means ''the only animal 
that laughs," as has been asserted. Pleased dogs, for example, 
of some breeds with mobile mouths ; others laugh with their tails, 
or the wriggle of their bodies. 

19 Hansen. The Lands of Greece, p. 381. 



run SENSES AND PEBEINGS. 477 

The association of discomfiture with laughter points to its 
animal origin of pleasure in destruction in devouring other ani- 
mals. We laugh when others are less fortunate than ourselves. 
Sympathy may develop into taking no pleasure in the sufferings 
of others, if directly under our observation, but for suffering in 
the abstract, such as a distant famine, we have no sympathy, as 
imagination is not strong enough to thus enlarge our sympathy. 

Excitement includes by gradations everything that the animal, 
as such, can do, from sleeping to fighting or running. Under 
activities of feeling and emotion, graded from mere sensations, 
as every other mental excitement originates, we have joy and 
sorrow as pleasure and pain expressions. They are recalled 
only through remembering our ideas in regard to them and the 
things said at the time, hence it is folly to expect to find such 
things as centres in the brain, for joy and sorrow, they are gen- 
eral feelings of satisfaction or unsatisfied tension. Any pleasant 
memory may cause joy and high spirits. The joy of maternal 
love is a selfish feeling, possible only where the nerve and sense 
development enables offspring to be recognized. Paternal love is 
later in development and springs from proprietorship and duty, 
with occasional vanity. Both parental affections may be culti- 
vated for foster children. Habit and heredity have largely 
created such likings, just as they have also made ingratitude of 
children the rule. Hope, according to James Mill, is anticipation 
of an agreeable feeling, hence it is a memory exercise, a renewed 
sensation, as joy is the realization of what is anticipated. 

Desires and cravings are based on atomic tensions, they are or- 
ganic appetites, associated or not with consciousness, involving 
subjective feeling, vague, misunderstood or otherwise. Atten- 
tion and choice are also involved if consciousness and will power 
are included. 



CHAPTER XIV. 
THE INSTINCTS AND EMOTIONS. 

The many functions of body and mind are so blended and 
depend upon each other to such different extents that no sharp 
divisions can be made between these functions. Arbitrary group- 
ings can be used with the understanding that they are only for 
convenience of classifying and are not natural separations. Thus 
instincts, emotions, feelings, and even sensations, are often insep- 
arable, and as consciousness, and frequently some forms of reason, 
are unavoidably included in intelligence, the artificiality of any 
system of tabulation of animal activities is evident, though in a 
general way 'an attempt of the sort is useful and justified. 

Thus among feelings, emotions and instincts the sexual desires 
could be entered, and in higher intellectual life this passion devel- 
ops into love by being bound up with a lot of mental processes, 
comprising reason, judgment, aesthetic considerations, and even 
self-sacrifice ; the sexual ardor thus ceases to be merely instinct, 
as it includes too much, nevertheless its base is in an instinct of 
the most powerful kind. 

Joy, grief, hope, hate engage these so-called feelings, and are 
instinctive and emotional, but for convenience we can profitably 
place the first two under Feelings, and the others under Emotions, 
but capable of criticism in any case, no matter what disposition 
is made of them, except this tentative apologetic one. 

Spencer calls instinct compound reflex action, or organic 
memory, and observes that memory is also an instinct which by 
multiplication of experiences is made stronger, and memory is in- 
cipient instinct, and between instinct and reason there is no gap. 
J. A. Thompson 1 discusses instinct and refers to Spencer's defini- 
tion that it is reflex action, non-mental, an adjustment of nerves 
and muscles, partly conscious, and that reason or intelligence is 

1 The Study of Animal Life, N. Y., 1896, pp. 153, 166. 

478 



THE INSTINCTS AND EMOTIONS. 479 

the faculty of adjusting means to ends, but for that matter so is 
instinct, which is reflex action, however complicated. Reason 
may precede instinct in the individual, as when learning to play 
the piano or to paint pictures requiring attention and interest of 
some sort, also conscious effort, and finally when a piece of music 
is mastered, neither consciousness nor effort is required, as the 
musician may play instinctively, or in his sleep. Deviation from 
easy machine-like muscular motions when once acquired, of course 
involving brain and nerve habitual adjustment, is so difficult as to 
compel the painter to use his left hand when he wishes to over- 
come an undesirable precision of touch that constitutes his "style." 
A penman may resort to similar, means. This tract definition of 
the nerves succeeds reason, though inherited or other instinct may 
be through tearing up of tracts disintegrated by reason and sub- 
sequently reinstated as instinct again of a different kind. That 
instinct is the end and destruction of reason is markedly evident in 
its causing the death of numberless animals, as in the case of the 
Norwegian lemmings, that swim out to sea to perish in their in- 
stinctive, inherited efforts and desires to reach some farther-off 
land. 

Inherited traits necessarily accompany and depend upon trans- 
mitted arrangement of brain shapes, grouping of nerve bundles 
and fibrils, and where reason attempts to introduce new habits or 
adjustments, some of these old built-up tracts must be torn up to 
accomplish new ends; effort, and even painful consciousness aie 
often required in such changes, and finally new habits may be 
built upon the downfall of the old, more readily in youth, when 
the brain, nerves, etc., are more pliable, than when later they are 
too firmly organized. Hence the fixity of habits of age and the 
capabilities of starting in new directions when young. 

Coughing and sneezing were once voluntary acts ; fishes still 
retain the ability to remove offensive substances from their throats 
at will, but through incessant repetition evolution has fostered 
these acts as unconsciously, unintentionally, instinctively, per- 
formed reflexes, when foreign irritating matters are to be ex- 
pelled from the throat. 

Darwin observes that as man possesses the same senses as the 
lower animals, his fundamental intuitions must be the same. Man 



4S0 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

has also some instincts in common, as that of self-preservation, 
sexual love, the maternal love for offspring new born, the desire of 
the latter to suck, and so forth. 

Instinct sometimes lessens as the intellect develops. Darwin 
notes that intelligent actions after being performed during sev- 
eral generations become converted into instincts and are inherited, 
as when birds on ocean islands learn to avoid man. 

There seems to be a relation between a few degrees of intel- 
ligence and a strong tendency to the formation of fixed, though 
not inherited habits ; persons slightly imbecile tend to act in every- 
thing by routine or habit, and they are rendered happier if this 
is encouraged. 2 The aged person and the senile dement particu- 
larly tend to this fixity of actions. 

Most activities are founded on the memory of past events, on 
foresight, reason and imagination, in both man and animals, and 
these may become fixed, instinctive, or habitual. 

Wallace 3 says that much intelligent work done by man is due 
to imitation and not to reason. While man has to learn by prac- 
tice, the beaver and bird build, and the spider spins its web, appar- 
ently as well the first time it tries as when old and experienced. 
He thinks that the Indians travel the trackless deserts by instinct, 
that both instinct and reason are displayed by birds in building 
nests, and that men build by reason and imitation, and he tells how 
young birds learn to build nests, but that the skill of birds is 
exaggerated, and that the works of mankind are mainly imitative. 
Birds alter and improve their nests as men do their homes. 

In a rough way we may divide the nerve centres for reason 
and emotion. The lowest levels being assigned to reflexes, the 
highest for reason, anjd the intermediate for emotional expression. 
The babv responds reflexly, the youth emotionally, and the adult 
more reasonably as the higher systems are organized. Failure of 
development may leave the idiot a baby through life, the imbecile 
an emotional youth, however old he may grow, precocity develops 
some in advance of their age and always erratically, often asso- 
ciated with tuberculosis of the brain. 

You may experience an involuntary feeling of disgust or even 

2 Descent of Man, Chapter on Mental Powers. 

3 Natural Selection, Ch. IV, Instinct. 



THE INSTINCTS AND EMOTIONS. 48 1 

dislike the decrepit, the doddering, the helpless, or the beggars, 
and this feeling may surprise and mortify you, but it is one for 
which you are not accountable, for it is your inheritance from 
thousands of years of your progenitors, and is an expression of 
the cruel dislike of the animal to whatever appeals to us for aid, 
because likely to interfere with our selfish personal comfort. 

In special instances this repugnance has been largely over- 
come and yields to the sense of duty, to habit and to other antag- 
onisms of reason or sympathy, but the brute instinct is there ready 
to astonish you by its presence in most unexpected ways, show- 
ing that consciousness is one thing and emotion another. Further, 
you may be guilty of a cruelty or neglect and your consciousness 
becomes aware of it afterward, and, according to your training, 
subsequent feelings of approval or disapproval also arise in your 
consciousness, but this latter did not proceed or originate, or even 
suggest, any such feelings, impulses or acts. It merely felt what 
you thought or did. What is intellect in an animal may become 
instinctive later, and changes in environment may compel the 
animal to forsake his instinctive inclinations and resort to reason 
again. Animals herding together are more apt to depend upon 
instinct such as imitation, while the non-social develop thought for 
themselves. The migration of birds and fishes" and hibernation 
of some mammals are instincts. The homing pigeon has a re- 
markable instinct. Ants, bees and beavers are specialized in 
their development so as to make them instinctive workers in cer- 
tain narrow lines. 

Money getting is an instinct which among capitalists is asso- 
ciated with the pleasures of achievement. The instinct of work 
is derived from the need of movement. Animals instinctively 
avoid poisons and serpents. An egg-sucking monkey will exhibit 
his abilities soon after birth. The chicken, when hatched, pecks 
at the fly. Seton Thompson tells of Lobo the wolf developing his 
instincts into intelligent methods and dying through faithfulness 
to his mate. 

Lines of least resistance through heredity and associated ser- 
viceable habit determine the presence and extent of instincts and 
emotions, and the insane are apt to exhibit these basic matters 



482 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

when the intellect is sufficiently degraded to lose control over 
them. 

Religions and political excitement are means of emotional 
exhibition, but not emotions by themselves, as supposed by those 
who speak of religious insanity, when the religious excitement was 
a mere means of showing the insane emotionalism which pre- 
existed. 

Fear is a universally distributed emotion, developing in vari- 
ous directions and associated with everything that any animal 
may do. Even plants that shrink from touch may have at least 
the motor part of the fear reflex if the sensory is absent. Emo- 
tional expression is divisible into that of pleasure or pain, sub- 
divided into laughter, smiles, complacency, according to intens- 
ity ; agony, astonishment, grief, despair, quiet, shyness, the mixed 
expressions being those of anger, sullenness. Anger implies the 
effort to remove or attack any pain inflicting agency. 

The tendency of northerners is to suppress emotional exhibi- 
tions which are common in warm countries. Songs are emotional 
expressions. Mere phraseology or resonant words excite negroes 
and others with untrained intellects more than appeals to reason. 
For instance Bryan carried away his audience with his "cross of 
gold" prettily worded sentence which when analyzed is silly, as 
time convinced the people it was. 

The emotions or passions have no centres in the brain, but arise 
in the body generally and later affect consciousness, as shown by 
your asking yourself why you grew so angry, why you should 
have done this, that or the other impulsive thing. Motion gives 
both physical and mental pleasure and sometimes enables pain 
suppression, its lowest form in animals is that of moving about 
and among its highest associates is the love of freedom. 

Play of all kinds, even exercise of the mind, work, whether 
physical or mental, gambling, games of the field or of chance, all 
are developed from the absolute need of motion. Children are 
tortured. by being kept quiet, and hunger is the great impeller to 
motion in general. The sport of birds and other animals, espe- 
cially the monkeys and the puma, indicate its general animal ori- 
gin. Even under the microscope otherwise invisible animals have 
been seen to play. 



THE INSTINCTS and EMOTIONS. 4S3 

Sleep is instinctive for the purpose of distributing food to 
brain, innscle and other bodily parts exhausted just as ground lies 
fallow till fertilized, a process requiring time, because the progres- 
sive chemical steps have to be taken enabling the atoms a b c to 
finally unite with x y z, the slow molecular building occurring 
during the intermediate stages as with constructing the embryo, 
which also induces the mother to sleep as nourishment is taken 
from her to the new organism, so it takes longer for her to recu- 
perate. That sleep was a nutritive process I announced in 1892 
and 1894. 4 Plants undergo analogous resting processes. 5 S. L. 
Clemens mentions shipwrecked starving sailors going without 
sleep for long periods, and in asylums the insane have gone in- 
credible periods without sleeping, facts accounted for by the fail- 
ure of nutritive processes. 

Dreams are faultily associated memories, often suggested by 
some recent impression, dropping off bed clothes may cause a 
dream of being naked in the streets, odors may arouse some recol- 
lection supposed to have been forgotten. The new and the old 
events may be mixed up in dreams. Pleasant happenings during 
the day or good ventilation in the sleeping room may cause 
pleasant dreams, trouble during the day may, with bad air in the 
room at night, cause dreams of difficulty, though not necessarily 
having anything to do with recent affairs. Rather the reverse. 
Old folks often dream of their grown-up children as babies. An 
architect harassed by trying to make a hundred thousand dollars 
pay for a million-dollar structure may dream of steamboats sink- 
ing, difficult hill-climbing, and so on. 

Nightmares are mere brain congestions. Healthy sleep like 
that of the infant should be dreamless, and is common to those 
who sleep out of doors, in trees or on the ground. Blind people 
do not have sight dreams if they have always been blind, and the 
same can be said of those always deaf that they do not dream in 
terms of hearing. 

Arrogance is an animal trait cropping out in the comfortable 
house dog who barks at beggars, the court bailiff who puts on 

4 Science, N. Y., Nov. 11, 1892; Journal of the American Medical Asso- 
ciation, March 10, 1894. 

5 Darwin, Power of Movement in Plants. 



484 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

more airs than the judge, and the rich man who fancies his 
money entitles his opinion to respect when he is usually badly 
informed on the topics he so pompously discusses. Let him lose 
his money and his surprise that his ignorance is openly laughed 
at is instructive both to himself and students of psychology. 

Deference is the opposite trait, shown by the poor man till he 
becomes rich also. Servants grow polite before the holidays. 
Cowardice and bravery are universal and are neither of them con- 
stantly associated with worthiness or unworthiness. A mean man 
may be brave and a generous one cowardly, but not necessarily.. 
Self-defense is practiced by all animals and some plants. 

Anger is next to fear as a widespread emotion. It is shown by 
animals with better defined reflexes but is often mixed with the 
fear feeling which preceded anger. 

Revenge is desired most by less highly organized people. Its 
foolishness is seen by those furnished with the higher order of 
intelligence. Hatred and disgust are associated with stomach feel- 
ings, the expression u he makes me sick" indicating this. Rage is 
expressed by canine tooth exposure. Contempt is often vanity, 
superciliousness. Laughter is caused by a suoeriority feeling 
of triumph over others, as when one falls or is unfortunate, the 
inclination to laugh is ready, however ashamed we may be later,. 
unless sympathy suppresses the ridicule. 

Suspicion is a natural ingrained inheritance evident in hunted 
and persecuted persons. Insanity often brings this to the front as 
delusions of persecution. Extreme age may develop suspicion, 
because the intellect is degraded, allowing the animal instincts to 
appear, and this is true of other things than suspiciousness in 
some cases. 

It is natural that the feeling of being hunted and persecuted 
should be associated with some forms of insanity when the or- 
ganic memories of millions of years of our animal ancestry are 
bound up with such feelings, for they were chased, slaughtered, 
trapped, fought and otherwise persecuted constantly, and the sen- 
sation of care is a ceaseless feeling with most of the descendants 
of such beings, developing into fright or suspicion when the mind 
grows hazy. 

Cruelty of animals, of children, adults, nations and of all ani- 



THE INSTINCTS AND EMOTIONS. 4S5 

mate nature is apparent on all sides. While the labors of such a 
man as Plimsoll to have the sailors humanely treated may occa- 
sionally be rewarded, most merciful measures have come about 
through evolution of adjusting to the lines of least resistanee, to 
expediency, through fear of consequences of not respecting the 
rights of others. Even nature is cruel. A quiet landscape may 
have been the site of prowling fierceness and fleeing terror, and 
for millions of years witnessed the agony and death of victims. 
Ladies with feathered hats and furs, are not the less causes of 
cruelty because the feathers were artificially arranged by a mil- 
liner and the furs are nicely tanned. The Indian with the coarse 
skin of an animal over his loins and feathers in his hair is the not 
very far off originator of just such decoration, while vanity and 
cruelty combined are the instigators of that sort of apparel. Few 
of us care to see butchery done and yet we eat meat and enjoy it. 

Sympathy is developed from the adjacency to suffering and to 
being able to mentally put ourselves in the place of the sufferer. 
When rich people are not in contact with poor they do not under- 
stand their needs, and when the poor grows rich he usually for- 
gets his former neighbors. Elephants are used to decoy others, 
and the stock-yards decoy bull, sheep or hog leads the others to 
slaughter as the confidence man traps his victim into a bunco 
game. 

Yet astonishingly good traits appear unexpectedly in war 
times, shipwreck or trouble. People to whom we were indifferent 
are revealed as sympathetic, but all too often opportunity in 
asylums and penitentiaries affords the brute instincts a longed-for 
chance for exercise in some attendant who was not suspected of 
being inhuman, and also the kindest of hearts are occasionally 
found in this same class of asylum employes, but if the atmosphere 
of the place is too political these well intentioned persons are liable 
to abuse and dismissal for protecting the helpless from brutality. 
Let such matters be better understood and institutions of the sort 
will become more humanely managed, just as seamen are nowa- 
days seldom flogged and starved as they were commonly in the 
last century. 

Unrestrained power degrades its possesor and some alienists 
speak of the insanity of power. 



4&6 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Maternal and paternal affection are common among animals, 
the first especially. The latter is more observable among man as a 
rather artificial article. The father being as a rule indifferent to 
his progeny in lower life, while the mother shows care, at least, 
while the young are helpless. 

A persistent doing of good with the expectation of a heavenly 
reward and a disregard of the reward on this earth may become 
a habit and be intensified if long lines of descendants are taught 
the same thing until finally an instinct is created to which the last 
in the line cannot do violence ; he may even find comfort in self- 
sacrifice, though an occasional person in this same line of descent 
may revert to the primitive utterly selfish stock. The other 
worldly incentive may finally be extinguished, and while religion 
no longer plays any part in the good deeds done the habit is 
firmly fixed and one may become automatically generous. 

Gratitude is best seen in its purest form in the dog who is fed, 
and how the sentiment gradually fades as he ceases to be fed. A 
gift lays the recipient under an irksome sense of obligation. Some 
succeed in removing this from the memory, while the more vulgar 
seeks revenge for the unpleasant feeling. This is actually the 
experience of physicians who suffer abuse and detraction from 
those they have helped, because the patient sees no other way of 
getting rid of the unpleasant recollection of being indebted to 
the doctor. High intelligence may maintain gratitude. 

The surprise one shows upon being made to suffer for doing 
what he regarded as a good deed proves that he has not foreseen 
consequences or has made improper associations of the relations 
of things, expecting, more likely, to be rewarded instead of pun- 
ished, or at least not made to suffer. He may recall instances of 
bad deeds being rewarded and infer that it pays to do wrong and 
that it is inconvenient to do good. This again reveals the suppo- 
sition that rewards and punishments are connected with deeds. 
With age he disassociates these matters. What is the use of being 
good if we are not punished for being bad? is a frequent query 
made without being aware of the confession it involves that good- 
ness was only with expectation of reward. 

The average novel concludes with things coming out all 
right, with rewards for merit and compensation for troubles, but 



THE INSTINCTS AND EMOTIONS. 487 

even those who are illiterate talk of such things and expect them. 
There is an expectation of reward for the most trifling sacrifice, 
if not here then hereafter. A settled conviction that doing good 
will pay, from training doubtless, being taught such things dur- 
ing the receptive period of childhood. 

As to friendship Saadi remarks : "Lend money to the poor 
and ask it of the rich and they will trouble you no more." An- 
other sage suggests that the holy bond of friendship lasts through 
a lifetime unless an attempt is made to borrow money. Too often 
friendship is taken advantage of or results, unintentionally, in 
suffering. 

Conscience is the outcome of instruction and heredity com- 
bined. What we are taught we should do and should not do 
influences behavior and feelings, but when one loses an oppor- 
tunity to cheat he may also suffer the same kind of remorse that 
the one does who has accidentally cheated someone. So it is all 
a matter of training and character, which in turn results from 
circumstances. It is the not having done the expedient thing that 
induces remorse, and it depends also upon what the person con- 
siders to be the most expedient. 

A skye terrier stole a cutlet and in spite of hunger finally 
brought it back to its master, hung its head in shame and slunk 
away." 1 Habit may become one of the greatest of instincts, actu- 
ally reversing, in time, the most primary workings of animal 
nature. Curing a habit entails suffering, but the acquiring of a 
habit may be gradual, as that of contention in families. If the 
environment which first favored the acquisition of any trait per- 
sists with the descendants then acquired habits may finally be- 
come instinctive and be transmitted, for instance, in spite of the" 
cruelty and rapacity of our earlier progenitors, the instruction of 
teachers, governesses and preachers, whether meant or not, with 
the constant inducements by rewards in heaven, there has been 
created a natural type of gentleman and lady utterly different 
from their forefathers. 

Imitation is a general animal instinct from the very meanest 
up to the highest type of life. It is what enables progress through 

' American Naturalist. June. 1885, p. 621. 



488 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

copying what has been found to be serviceable. Mimicry of ani- 
mals and plants enables escape from enemies at times or more 
success in preying upon others. Hypocricy is imitation and has 
its uses in the assuming to be better than in reality, a sort of 
deference to superiority, which in time may lead to the real supe- 
riority, if not by the hypocrite, at least by others. 

Vanity is a prevalent animal instinct, as in the peacock and 
multitudes of other living things, up to the general who spends 
his leisure in planning new uniforms. Women are notoriously 
vain, and to decorate themselves with bright rocks, hides of wild 
beasts and plumage of birds vast mercantile combinations are 
stimulated, and colossal fortunes are piled up. Even the desire 
for fame is a species of vanity, but the student who learns to care 
nothing for appreciation is the most apt to secure it. What an 
ephemeral and worthless thing it is can be seen in the multitudes 
welcoming Admiral Dewey for his Spanish victories, and in a 
few weeks being influenced against him, for trivial reasons, by 
politicians who feared that he had presidential aspirations. 

Pride is a different matter, and may be creditable in preserv- 
ing self-respect, in spite of the worthless opinions of contem- 
poraries. 

Vanity renders us susceptible to flattery, of which fact the 
demagogue in fully aware, and his superciliousness is amusing 
when he no longer thinks he has need of obsequiousness. The 
low organized mind fancies it can discriminate where deference 
and arrogance can be distributed and is incessantly making mis- 
takes. A step higher in intelligence develops the constantly po- 
lite person, but even he may, like the Spanish captain-general, 
have a cruel disposition. Vanity is independent of other traits, 
as some very estimable persons may be excessively vain, though 
in most cases only in their younger days. The seat of vanity 
is in the muscular consciousness. It leads to "philanthropy" in 
the desire to build monuments, as pyramids, colleges, etc. Holmes 
asks what is fame worth in a planet whose crust is fossils and 
whose centre is fire. Notoriety is often mistaken for fame. The 
Spaniard is the vainest with the least occasion for it. Detrac- 
tion is the favorite method of attempting to pull down one who 
has claims to superiority. 



THE INSTINCTS AND KMOTIO\S. 4S9 

Thackeray 1 remarks that a ruffian like Henry YITI talked as 
gravely about the divine powers vested in him as if lie had been 
an inspired prophet. A wretch like James I not only believed 
that he has in himself a particular sanctity, but other people be- 
lieved him. He was a Scotch snob without courage, generosity, 
honesty or brains, but just read what the great divines and doc- 
tors of England wrote about him. Charles II, his grandson, was 
a rogue, but not a snob, whilst Louis XIV, his old square toes 
of a contemporary, the great worshiper of big-wiggery, has al- 
ways struck me as a most undoubted and royal snob. 

Speaking of ''The Peerage," which lies upon so many draw- 
ing-room tables, he says : Considering the harm that foolish 
lying book does I would have all the copies of it burned, as the 
barber burned all Quixote's books of humbugging chivalry. 

He asks : Why is the poor college servitor to wear that name 
and badge still? Because universities are the last places into 
which reform penetrates. Thackeray should have become famil- 
iar with insane asylums run by politicians. He further notes 
that the English snob rampant has no equal with such indomi- 
table belief in himself, that sneers you down, and all the world 
besides, and has such insufferable, admirable, stupid contempt 
for all people but his own, nay, for all sets but his own. In Eng- 
land the dinner-giving snobs occupy a very important place in 
society. , 

As to jealousy : 

"He who would free from malice end his days, 
Must live obscure and never merit praise." 8 

Even a dog is jealous of its master's affection if turned to 
another dog. Envy may be justified or unjustified, as when a 
hvpocrite claims to be what another may be who fails of recog- 
nition ; in the other case an incompetent may envy the rewards of 
skill and merit. Lord Melbourne said he thanked God that in 
the Order of the Garter there was no question of "damned merit." 
Pestalozzi devoted his life to the welfare of children, but was 
impeded by the petty jealousy of the school director of Burgdorf. 
Dryden remarks : 

7 The jc>ook of Snobs. 

8 Gay. 



490 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

"And malice in all critics reigns so high 
That for small errors they whole plays decry." 

Imitation induces followers in detraction : "You have many 
enemies that know not why they are so, but, like to village curs, 
bark when their neighbors do." 9 Both Lord Nelson and Admiral 
Schley were, a hundred years apart, hounded by jealous superiors, 
who tried to steal the credit for their victories, and such events 
are numberless in history. 

Deceit in all its endless ramifications is a natural inheritance 
by all animals, and in some plants it appears evident. Nature has 
incessantly deluded and the truth has been hard to secure in all 
ages, particularly when man has often preferred to believe in 
the lie. 

However strange it may appear to some, who are inclined to 
think otherwise, there is such a thing as nearly absolute honesty. 
An occasional person in a community cannot stoop to a dishonor- 
able action, and we can readily refer such dispositions to train- 
ing, whether by self or through others, or to heredity where 
training has resulted in a modification of descendants through 
persistent effect on lines of generations, and to habit, however the 
habit may have originated, and whatever may have been the in- 
centive. Savages may be surprisingly honest, while others of 
their tribes are not. Dishonesty runs riot in civilized communi- 
ties, while honesty is also unexpectedly found there. Paradoxical 
as it may seem, the utmost honesty in some particular may be as- 
sociated with dishonesty in others. Scrupulosity with moral ob- 
tuseness. It is largely a matter of training, accepting ready made 
ideas on all such subjects. 

A sincerely religious person is often honest, as he thinks it 
folly to be otherwise, since this world has no inducements com- 
pared to those of a future existence. It is merely a matter of 
common-sense with him that riches in this world are not to be 
compared to those oi another world. Now imagine a head injury 
in such a person obliterating the memory of ideas on favorite 
topics, as the religious views which guide his actions, then the 
incentive to honesty being gone a complete inversion of character 

9 Shakespeare. 



THE INSTINCTS AND EMOTIONS. 



49 I 



may take place, merely due to the failure to recollect and there- 
fore to be guided by such recollections. 

Opportunity may tempt latent dishonesty that is common to 
all as an inheritance from our deceitful ancestry. Some people 
have better opportunities to steal than others, as lawyers, pub- 
lishers and politicians ; it is not because they are less honest than 
others that they avail themselves of their chances. In the case 
of bankers honesty is their capital, their stock in trade. It pays 
them to be honest until the big chance occurs, as with Alvord, 
the trusted teller of the First National Bank of New York, who, 
being so wholly trusted, stole six hundred thousand dollars. 
Plumbers, church and hospital treasurers also have good oppor- 
tunities. 

"Never to suspect evil is as fine as it is foolish," says Schopen- 
hauer. The trouble is that the one who always looks for good in 
others is misplacing his regard and sees it where it does not exist, 
and overlooks it where it really is present. 

Pirates and freebooters in early days were highly respected ; 
nowadays they are merely disguised, and while we recognize the 
real thief under the disguise we accord him the same respect our 
ancestors had for Captain Kidd and Robin Hood. There may be 
honesty in one regard coupled with dishonesty in others. Merely 
a matter of training. Employes may be honest with an employer 
and both be dishonest with the public. 

There is a French instance of unswerving integrity. Lieut. 
Col. Picquart, who has been called the grandest man in France. 
Honest, and with the courage of his convictions, with hordes of 
rascals like Merrier, the would-be' assassin of Dreyfus and 
Labori, hounding and persecuting him, with rewards offered him 
for knavery, he persisted in telling the truth and redeemed the 
character of France. 

Deceit has its disadvantages, for practiced upon others con- 
stantly it disables one from seeing the truth at all. Cynicism and 
the thinking of lies are among some of these disadvantages. 

National dishonesty, in treaty breaking and grabbing of ter- 
ritory, is patriotically approved by both Church and State. 



CHAPTER XV. 
THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 

Animals, including the primates, have the same senses, pas- 
sions, affections and emotions generally, even the complex ones 
of jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude and even magnanim- 
ity. They all practice deceit and are revengeful ; some are sus- 
ceptible to ridicule and have a sense of humor ; they feel wonder 
and curiosity, exhibit the ability to imitate, to exert attention, 
deliberation, choice, memory, imagination ; they associate ideas 
and have reasoning ability in varying degrees. There are differ- 
ences between animals of the same kind as to intelligence, horses 
or dogs may be idiotic or sagacious. All animals are liable to 
insanity, and to many of the diseases common among men. 

That animals develop in intelligence is proven by the fact that 
the young can be more readily caught than adults. 

In Seton-Thompson's books he shows the kinship of man and 
animals. He tells of dignity and love, constancy in a wolf, sa- 
gacity in a crow, obedience in a partridge, fidelity in a dog, moth- 
er love in rabbits ; the spanking of disobedient cubs by she-bears, 
bullyism in a coyote, the love of liberty in a mustang. 

He says that "for the wild animal there is no such thing as 
a gentle decline in peaceful old age. Its life is spent at the front 
in line of battle, and as soon as its powers begin to wane in the 
least its enemies become too strong for it, it falls." When man 
drops out of his usual place he leaves his defences, particularly 
as age advances. He too is like the wild animal and the tramp — 
everyone neglects or is against him till he dies, and even in this 
civilized age the murder of a mere outcast is not inquired into. 

The two wolves, this author mentions, who destroyed two 
hundred sheep in one night out of pure wantonness, are no worse 
than the county insane asylum employe who secured his place by 
political influence as a reward for ballot-box stuffing, who kicked 
in the ribs of an inoffensive helpless old dement because he could 

492 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 



493 



safely do so. Any mention of such an incident in the newspa- 
pers fails to interest the public, as the reader concludes that the 
matter is mentioned by some "fool-reformer," or that it is sensa- 
tionalism for political effect. A wealthy citizen attacked by bur- 
glars becomes the center of deep interest and sympathy. 

There are grades of intelligence as between the pike who has 
to bump his nose many times against a glass before he finally 
learns that he cannot pass it, and the monkey or savage who 
learns from one experience. 

Many birds have great curiosity as well as caution. Xor is it 
the only animal owning those instincts. Some animals are ex- 
cessively clean, while Hindoos and some Spaniards are filthy. 

Orangs have dispositions to fight like human roughs. The 
female carries its young precisely as do the coolies of India. They 
have human-like affections, satisfaction, pain, rage and pleasure. 
Many low races of men make no better homes than some of the 
higher apes do. Dr. Hayes says that his polar dogs recognized 
thin ice and separated widely so as not to be too heavy in one 
spot. Hozeau tells of dogs searching for water in low spots of 
ground as though they knew that water gathered in depressions. 
Lubbock taught his dog to read and smell words as out, tea, bone, 
water, food, printed on cards which the dog would bring as he 
wished to go out, to drink, to eat, etc. 

Old Spanish and French painters sometimes have hallucina- 
tions* for they make points, at times, of imaginary game, and 
are subject to epilepsy. 

Domestic dogs have improved upon their ancestry, the wolves 
and jackals, in affection, trustworthiness, temper and probably 
general intelligence. Horses have been known to seek the farrier 
and hold up the foot on which was a broken shoe. Intelligence 
is marked in beavers, ants, bees, and social crows are quick- 
witted. 

Consciousness may conveniently be ranked as a mode of mo- 
tion along with other physical forces, in spite of the prejudice 
against such a view by those who know little about chemistry or 
physics. It is connected with all mental acts usually ; it is the 
form and condition of all knowledge, the awareness of things. 
Sleep, fainting, somnambulism and delirium make intervals be- 



494 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

tween conscious states. It may oscillate from one thing - to an- 
other and is subject to fatigue, being capable of becoming 
stronger, weaker or fresher by what one does. Proper regard 
for the circulation best accounts for the phenomena, as the vigor 
of consciousness depends on the blood flow. It is occupied with 
objects, whether internal or external. It is a brain function, a 
mode of molecular motion, inherent in all atoms apparently, but 
as cells unify the consciousness of atom and colonies of cells 
create the animal then the brain centralizes the colonial conscious- 
ness. The higher developed brain affording the better conscious- 
ness and conditions determine differences in acuteness of the fac- 
ulty in all living things. Resistance increases consciousness and 
ease lessens it. 

The usual objection to consciousness being a form of energy, 
such as heat, light, etc., is stated as consisting in consciousness 
being a thing apart and unassociated with the other forces, hav- 
ing nothing to do with matter in general and not being convert- 
ible into other forms of motion. The answers to this could be 
that: 

. The materials of the brain are necessary to consciousness. 
Destruction of parts of the brain destroy consciousness. When 
badly nourished consciousness is defective if intoxicated or too 
greatly nourished. If much blood is sent to the brain, conscious- 
ness is increased. If the blood is impure or lacks quantity con- 
sciousness is imperfect. 

That consciousness intermits, comes and goes, is paralleled 
by heat being latent and other forces also, the one being con- 
verted into the other as lightning (electricity) is produced by 
heat accumulation, the one being produced by conversion from 
the other. 

Herzen's dictum that consciousness is inversely as facility of 
reflex and directly as effort shows the association of all forces 
from consciousness to molar. Tentatively the assumption may be 
made that a conscious act is the immediate and direct conversion 
of consciousness into motion of the animal and the motions of the 
animal, including the chemical movements in the brain, are what 
arouse and constitute consciousness. 

The stoppage of the mechanical movement of the heart causes 



Till: INTELLECTUAL- FACULTIES. 495 

the loss of consciousness by its prgan withdrawing the materials 
for its continuance. 

Consciousness gradually develops from infancy to the period 
of life when the faculties are at their best. It fades with senility 
and disease. It gradually rouses as the senses clear after sleep, 
and is best in proportion to sense acuteness, vigor, good blood 
supply in the brain and after proper rest. 

You are conscious of your body and even of your clothing — 
self-consciousness. You learn by a looking-glass and what oth- 
ers say to you about yourself, and these sense impressions you 
accept as making up your self-consciousness, and you may ac- 
cording to circumstances have most erroneous opinions on this 
as on other subjects. A prince may be persistently flattered and 
feel conscious of abilities and features he does not possess. It is 
another instance of the deceit of the senses. 

Change your silks and broadcloth for rags and your con- 
sciousness undergoes adjustment to the change; pride is replaced 
by humility, the peacock feels as the worm might be supposed 
to if aware of his limitations. 

It was Jouffroy who held that we know our body only ob- 
jectively as an extended solid mass, similar to other bodies of the 
universe outside the ego and foreign to the perceiving subject, 
exactly as we know our table or mantelpiece. This is called 
self-consciousness. 

When we grow accustomed to impressions so that they lose 
their former effect a readjustment of the parts concerned in the 
impression must have occurred, a diffusion of the vibrations into 
other and more general channels takes place. Muscles visibly 
adapt themselves to new demands by growth so that what origi- 
nally may have required severe conscious effort can be uncon- 
sciously and easily performed. Xerves are no exception to the 
rule of tissue increase by exercise. The miller becomes habit- 
uated to the noise of machinery and sleeps undisturbed by it. 
The rustic excited by city noises may become accustomed to them 
in time, and returning to the quiet of the country be disturbed 
by it. 

An idea of the method by which the brain may receive im- 
pressions can be gained from observation of the process of tele- 



496 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

graphing. The clicks which make the dots and dashes of the 
Morse code when grouped in certain ways stand for letters; thus 
two dots mean i, three dots mean s, four dots mean h, one dash 
means t, two dashes mean m, three dashes five, and so on. By 
practice the words formed by these combined clicks are under- 
stood as readily as speech. An operator may be fast asleep, and 
paying no attention to the clicking of his instrument ; the moment 
his call is sounded the peculiar grouping of the clicks will 
awaken him at once, as readily as though his name had been 
called. 1 

Perception conveys the idea of a sense impression in connec- 
tion with memory of past experiences, and apperception is essen- 
tially the same thing as the union of a new with past impressions. 
Apprehension is practically awareness. 

Memory consists of memories divided into what has been 
stored up in the brain cells by the senses of sight, hearing, etc., 
so memory has no special seat but several seats. There can be no 
sympathy, joy or grief when memory of what relates to those 
sentiments has been taken away. For example, an injury to the 
visual centre in the brain made a patient unable to recall the face 
of a friend who he heard was dead, but he was surprised to find 
that he had no sorrow when told of the loss of his friend, simply 
because, as far as sight was concerned, he could not recall him. 

The receptivity of the young for memorizing as compared 
with that of the old person is in the ratio of the chemical integrity 
of the brain materials, the plastic developing youthful brain reg- 
isters easily and retains what the denser less yielding structures 
of age fail to record, and calcification or other change included 
under hardening may be observed to be a senile method of invo- 
lution. 

The events of youth are much more readily recalled, and as 
we grow older recent happenings do not impress us so that we 
can as readily remember them, and an explanation of this could 
be that in youth first occurrences make profounder impressions 
upon the sensorium according to the childish estimate of their 
importance, and later in life as we improve in our judgment mat- 

1 Studies in Telegraphic Language, W. L. Bryan and N. Harter, Psy- 
chological Review, 1897, p. 27. 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 497 

tors which previously scorned unimportant assume new aspects 
and may impress us enough to cause them to be recalled from 
this later date. A vast range of happenings we gradually drop 
from memory as useless to us to retain, though practically they 
are still in the recollection for mere reminder suffices to cause 
them to be recognized, but consciousness is habituated to them 
and their recurrence is unnoticed through the rule that conscious- 
ness is concerned more in the unfamiliar and that which necessi- 
tates effort, the blood being consumed more at the points of such 
activity in the brain; these events that pass day by day through 
familiarity we disregard, and as age routinizes life the automatic 
responses to daily needs leave the mind unengaged by compara- 
tively trivial things, and there is more time and inclination for 
exercise of higher intelligence based upon retention of what are 
really important affairs or what the experience, habits, education 
and circumstances cause him to regard as important. So as life 
is measured by events the first part is the longer, and as so few 
new things seem to happen in age that period is apparently 
shorter ; further the perceptions in youth are exercised in looking 
for new sensations, and hence life seems full of experiences then, 
whereas age is reminiscent and ponders past matters while more 
obtuse or indifferent to the present. Then with a well-stored 
brain solitude is not so irksome as it is to the superficial or unde- 
veloped. Time hangs heavily upon the idle-minded, while atten- 
tion and interest cause time to pass swiftly. 

Association of events occurs in the mind through seeing, hear- 
ing, etc., them together, whether such things have any relation 
to each other or not, and this accounts for the mysterious and 
provoking recalling to our minds of things, and we cannot ac- 
count for why they should have come back to us at that time. 
It is simply because we cannot help learning two or more 
things at the same time. Animals and savages often maintain 
the original multiple impression as children do. As the trees and 
grass wave and a storm follows, hence these crude intellects con- 
clude that the wind and storm are caused by the grass and trees. 
It is a common savage supposition due to this association. A 
gambler loses at cards and recalls that he met a cross-eyed man 
that day who must have caused his losses. The sight of a rose 



498 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

may recall its odor, or its smell may bring the flavor to memory. 
Even the thought of a lemon may make saliva flow. Many in- 
structive movements have associated impressions in memory for 
their causes. When the sexes are not appareled as usual the 
unsuitable dress changes regard for them, the customary associa- 
tion is disturbed. Lingerie attracts the eye where bloomers dis- 
gust. A modern bonnet on a statue of Venus appears ludicrous 
and incongruous. Mental suggestion is a form of association. 
False association is a mighty influence in human error, and oc- 
curs in dreams, delusions, superstitions, ignorance. Cause and 
effect are constantly misplaced. 

Imagination is an exercise of memory association, by which 
resemblances and unlikenesses are grouped. Childhood is full of 
fancy, and it requires long experience and a better fund of mem- 
orized facts before imagination can be properly curbed and made 
useful. Dogs, cats, horses, birds have vivid dreams, hence they 
have imagination. 

Appreciation of beauty exists in butterflies, fishes, reptiles, 
birds and mammals as they are attracted by colors and symmetry 
of form in their mating, and this is an associative and imagina- 
tive exercise. 

Attention may be reflex or involuntary, but it is thereby that 
curiosity is exercised and learning made possible. A cat watch- 
ing a mouse hole is an instance of absorbed attention, so intense 
that one may approach unawares. Similarly in man the absorp- 
tion may be such an extreme as to shut out sense impressions for 
other matters, due, in my opinion, to the nutrient reflexes being 
engaged in supplying more blood to the brain centres exercised, 
at the expense of contiguous or distant centres, rendering them 
less acute. 

Curiosity is the desire to know, and is clearly associated with 
attention. Some dogs are more attentive than others, or even 
than some monkeys, but attention increases in the scale of intel- 
ligence. 

Interest is an associated condition of attention, and may make 
studies delightful. 

Compared with other mental acts volition is quite simple. It 
is simply the final act which gives effectiveness to choice or which 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 499 

realizes the object of choice. Unless we make it cover every im- 
pulse or decision of the will from attention to choice it will only 
denote the final initiating force of physical movement, the ex- 
ternal result of will leading to the realization of desire. The con- 
sciousness of an end or purpose is included and the executive 
fiat. The will may be considered relatively free and also rela- 
tively bound, but as everything has an antecedent cause the will 
is absolutely not free, and may be regarded as merely the strong- 
est impulse, the acts performed being due to a resultant of forces 
in which consciousness may or may not participate. Will power 
is dependent on health largely and is merely a physical manifes- 
tation. Anything that debilitates and irritates, such as severe 
pruritus, a grief or other distraction, may place will power at a 
disadvantage, but after all such things are merely part of what 
will determine will power. 

The will power is weakened or destroyed or perverted by 
alcohol, through its deranging the inner mechanism and substi- 
tuting unhealthy for healthy impulses. Aboulia, or will paraly- 
sis, and the other extreme of obstinacy, show that will power is 
co-ordination and impulse, either failing to express results or ex- 
erted improperly and too much. 

In the insanity of doubt the vaso motor irregular action may 
be conceived as occurring in certain centres between the recep- 
tion of the sensory and the selection of the efferent outgoing 
motor impulse, the blood oscillating, instead of going direct to 
the part concerned in the usual motor projection impulse, may 
easily cause the vacillation. Stimulants have also disposed of 
this trouble, but it is inadvisable to rely upon them, for they sub- 
stitute pernicious for the erratic action. 

In imitated insanity as folie a doux the weak mind is the main 
factor, such persons are organically defective. The weak will 
of the imbecile is well known ; there is force lacking. 

Thought regards the relation between things and events. Ap- 
prehension regards facts and thought their relations. Discrimi- 
nation involves attention, selection and perception of differences. 
Jt is analysis. 

Abstraction concentrates upon certain qualities and neglects 
others. Comparison and generalization results. Concrete refers 



500 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

to wholes. Reason or reflection utilizes the memories of events. 

Induction is the hypothetical process of reasoning, leading up 
to conclusions, examining facts and making temporary inferences 
until better ones can be made. 

Belief does not mean faith, but both may come before knowl- 
edge, as conviction before proof. Faith trusts with or without 
reason, belief accepts or assents without proof. Belief may be 
founded on testimony and trust in a person, or on induction, so it 
may represent the probable in various degrees, but a belief is 
never by itself proof of anything except that the person is con- 
vinced, even if he die for his belief. Doubt suspends judgment 
for want of evidence. Science teaches us that it is not necessary 
to have opinions in all cases. We may with great advantage leave 
our conclusions a "scientific blank." It is the most ignorant who 
always has an infallible opinion on every subject, particularly if 
rich or powerful enough to force his ideas upon others. 

Ideas in the world's history have survived through their nat- 
ural selection, such ideas as were fittest to persist by reason of 
the receptivity of the people for them, have prevailed and flour- 
ished, sometimes a foolish lying idea might be the best suited 
to spread and be enthusiastically believed in. When the Arabs 
were ripe for Mohammed's teachings they gulped them and 
fought to sustain them. Many an idea has been forced upon peo- 
ple by the sword, and the next generation would not understand 
how the world could have ever thought differently. 

Imitation plays a strong role in propagating modes of thought 
which the masses unthinkingly or unreasoningly take for granted 
as correct, and, everywhere, what the children are taught in early 
life, no matter how silly it may be, throughout life remains as a 
fixed influence controlling the acts of the adult with occasional 
rare instances of overcoming such bondage by individual reflec- 
tion or change of environment, seldom through the development 
of reasoning power alone without external aid, but so strong 
may this tendency become in a few instances that older training 
when erroneous has given way to reasoned out recognition of its 
absurdity, and, on the other hand, good influences have also been 
negatived by a bad life. 

Reason, according to Herbert Spencer, affords no gap be- 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 501 

tweetl it and instinct, for rational actions pass into instinctive and 
arise from instinctive when too complex. The human brain is 
an organized register of infinitely numerous experiences received 
during the evolution of life, or of that series of organisms 
through which the human organism has been reached. Then it is 
that faculties unknown to some lower races, as musical abilitv, 
"become congenital, or are born into the higher ones. 

There is wide variance in the ways in which people think, ac- 
cording to age, station in life, means of support, anxieties and 
thousands of other influences, to say nothing of the degree of de- 
velopment of the brain. There are, however, certain almost in- 
variable methods of thought resulting from commonly found 
conditions, such as the humility of poverty, the arrogance of 
riches (with exceptions of course, I merely said almost in- 
variable). A greater development of mind in the poverty- 
stricken and the wealthy would raise the spirits of the one and 
tend to humiliate the other in realizing that there is something in 
Emerson's "law of compensations." The poor man would realize 
that he is nearer nature and can rely on whatever friend he 
makes. The rich man would see how he has surrounded himself 
with those who would surely desert him if he lost his means ; he 
would know how sycophants, intriguers, quacks, shysters, swin- 
dlers and hypocrites are attracted to him as the carrion attracts 
buzzards. Unable to separate the true from the false were he to 
develop intellect enough to do so, he would be appalled at the 
results of his being rich, and despise the fawners and flatterers 
who in his previous mental state he regarded as his best friends, 
and would cultivate an entirely different class of neighbors whom 
previously he looked upon with indifference or disdain. Greedy 
heirs do not wait upon the poor man, anxious for him to die ; if 
people call upon him it is not so often with some design. 

The impossibility of awakening the public to an advanced 
idea of its highest interests is shown time and again. The eager 
reformer can demonstrate that much good to the community and 
to individuals will flow from a certain line of action, but the pop- 
ulace is busy with its bread-winning, and turns deaf ears to 
pleadings for concerted action in things it fancies but remotely 
affects them, or likely enough hearken more readily to designing 



502 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

and ignorant bigots who oppose advanced ideas. 

Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood, though, es- 
tablished by the most convincing proofs, was not generally re- 
ceived during his life-time, and his practice was hurt by its pub- 
lication. Sir Charles Bell lost many consultations when he pub- 
lished a little book on the mechanism of the human hand. 

In the State of New York asylums for the chronic insane 
were found to be pernicious and were abandoned because the 
politicians availed themselves of the better opportunities they 
afforded to rob the helpless ; ''anything was good enough for the 
incurables," and the expense to the other asylums was increased 
by taking away dements who could labor. But the Illinois poli- 
ticians induced a "woman's club" in Peoria to start a petition to 
have an asylum there for the incurable insane, and one was built 
in spite of the records against such a system. 

Tasmanians have no words to express qualities such as our 
words hard or tall, but have to resort to comparisons "like a 
stone," or "long legs." As mental powers develop the language 
becomes less pictorial and more abstract, and thought evolution 
is thereby quickened, but it is a question if this change of terms 
does not still accompany the same old methods of thought, com- 
parison, for we may say hard and yet think "like a stone," and 
tall is still long legs in our thoughts. The Tasmanians name 
particular varieties of trees, but have no name for tree. The red 
men have no general term for oak-tree, the different varieties 
being named. According to the needs of peoples apparent gener- 
alizations may grow, but they are really concrete in all cases. 
Generalizing is more a memory widening, filling it with more pic- 
tures of similar things classed under One prominent type which 
stands for all. 

The capable lawyer, Defore trying a suit at law, will study the 
environment all he can ; he prefers to know the judge, the law- 
yers, the jury, and even get a glance at the court-room before 
beginning, for all these details count in the result. And a lec- 
turer will consider to whom he is speaking. The tactless will 
write or lecture or plead without regard to the requirements or 
the fitness of things, and this sort of absence of foresight reacts 
upon one's efforts. 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 503 

Small official minds delight in embarrassing operations of a 
government department by some far-reaching ruling that will 
inconvenience thousands and cause vast sums of money to be lost, 
and all wholly unnecessary, merely to show authority, as the pea- 
cock flaunts his tail. For weeks there was an instruction to the 
effect that writing "printed matter only" on the outside of a 
newspaper or book to be mailed placed it among written commu- 
nications liable to full letter postage. The insurrection this rul- 
ing caused ended in its speedy abolition, but lilliput intellects 
are busy with similar interferences, fearful that their originators 
may not attract attention. 

"Knowledge is power and wealth" is an old saw, and its verity 
depends largely on who has the knowledge and what kind it is, 
and what one considers wealth, for the greatest knowledge at- 
tained may induce its possessor to abstain from either power or 
wealth, as usually understood, the knowledge alone being the 
greatest wealth and conferring happiness that completes the de- 
sires of life. 

Judgment cannot be a faculty, it can only be a condition of 
different faculties and good or bad, according to the states of the 
faculties. Nevertheless it appears to be a general condition de- 
veloped in some and more or less absent in others. It does not 
appear in any animals or man until a certain accumulation of 
facts is made which requires a stage of development beyond 
youth. Usually it is better in the aged person and poor in the 
child. Some develop it earlier than others, and it varies greatly 
in individuals. It is the same as inference, deduction and logic. 
It is arrived at by a process of induction from the accumulation 
of facts registered in the brain during a lifetime. Something 
may interfere with the full exercise of all the judgment of which 
a person is capable, and hence an expression of judgment may 
be erroneous or insufficient through only a portion of the facts 
being used in an inference. 

An instance of judgment exercise may be seen in the case of 
an old general with much experience and reading advising the 
younger officers in his command against a certain rash move- 
ment. He recollects the disadvantages from similar moves, and 



504 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

therefore judgment depends largely upon memory and ability 
to make comparisons (reasoning) more or less promptly. 

The reason why the judgment of a man of sixty years is ripe 
is because by that time he is most apt to be free from thousands 
of previous false views; his accumulation of experience enable 
his comparisons to be more accurate, and hence he sees life more 
nearly as it really is, and can infer better in consequence. The 
natural conservatism, however, may deter the old man from a 
venture in which the recklessness of youth might succeed, but 
the counsel of the old is safer in the end. 

Ignorance, bias or prejudging are matters so related that, for 
our purposes they may be readily included in a consideration of 
prejudice, formed from pre and judice, and one of the few words 
that well convey their meaning. Knowledge is relative, no one 
has adequate information on all subjects. Some are more ig- 
norant than others, but the most ignorant of all is the one who 
is too ignorant to know how T ignorant he is. One may be well 
informed in certain lines, say of business, or of a profession, and 
have the reputation of being intelligent and well educated. Alas ! 
along comes a sharper, skilled in other lines than those with 
which the "intelligent, well educated man," is familiar, and he 
is swindled. He may even gulp body-destroying and mind-de- 
bauching morphine, cocaine, and acetanelid medicines, because 
they were advertized by unscrupulous quacks, and as for "spir- 
itual" matters, what will not the "intelligent, well educated" per- 
son believe in? 

Nations may be prejudiced against one another through mu- 
tual ignorance, existing for generations. Creeds and political 
parties provoke misunderstandings which, as time elapses, appear 
absurd. When one is brought up to believe a party, a nation, 
or a religion, to be radically wrong the childish inference is also 
made that everyone connected therewith is bad. To realize that 
"no man or measure is ever wholly right or wholly wrong" re- 
quires a thoughtfulness and experiences more than those of the 
average adult. 

The most learned is often unable to buy books. So the means 
of obtaining judgment do not ensure it in all cases, obviously so 
when we see so many dunces graduating from universities. The 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 505 

quantity of acquirement does not measure the quantity of insight, 
nor do wisdom and information vary together. When facts are 
unorganized knowledge is a burden. 

One great difficulty in weighing evidence and drawing infer- 
ences from the simplest array of facts comes from the easily ob- 
served failure of listeners to retain in their minds the first parts 
of a lesson or discourse before they reach the last parts, and so 
they do not connect, associate or group the different parts, though 
they admit the truth of each statement. Reviewers, even if they 
take the trouble to cut the leaves or to try to understand a book, 
which is not too often, usually state things unfairly through ina- 
bility to grasp matters in all their relations. Holmes spoke of 
critics as being made from chips left over from the making of 
authors. 

The untrained constantly pervert evidence by putting down 
as perceived what is merely conclusion. They are often unable 
to tell the objective from the subjective, what they have seen or 
heard from what they have merely thought. 

Excited feelings make us wrongly estimate probabilities and 
destroy our view of relative importance. 

Holmes defined a pseudo-science, such as phrenology, "as a 
nomenclature with self-adjusting arrangements by which all posi- 
tive evidence, or such as favors its doctrines, is admitted and all 
negative evidence, or such as tells against it is excluded. It is 
invariably connected with some lucrative practical application. 
Its professors and practitioners are usually shrewd people ; they 
are very serious with the public, but wink and laugh a great deal 
among themselves. The believing multitudes consist of women 
of both sexes, poetical optimists, people who always get cheated 
in buying horses, philanthropists who insist on hurrying the mil- 
lenium and others of this class, here and there a clergyman, least 
frequently a lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a 
horse jockey or a member of the detective police. A pseudo- 
science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies, and it may 
contain many truths, and even valuable ones. The rotten est bank 
starts with a little specie. It puts out a thousand promises to pay 
on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly 
3. good one." 



506 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

As to the outcry against demolishing idols of any kind, wheth- 
er of pseudo-sciences or of a superstition, Holmes goes on to 
say : "There isn't a thing that was ever said or done in Boston, 
from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it 
tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that wasn't thought in- 
delicate by sqme fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the entrails of 
commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into colics as 
often as the revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come 
over it." 

The disposition of those who play upon the emotions and de- 
mand recognition as an authority on all subjects is noted in the 
remark by Holmes, that : "J oml Wesley meddled with medi- 
cines, as many other ministers have done, sometimes well and 
sometimes ill, owing to their very loose way of admitting evi- 
dence as seen in their certificates to patent medicines." 

Carlyle holds that popular opinion is the greatest lie on earth. 
While this is a too hasty summing up, it can be truthfully said 
that it is very often superficial. 

The attention of the world was directed toward the Dreyfus 
case, and the indignation aroused indicated how very little idea 
there was extant that millions of even worse conspiracies had 
succeeded, and history often was in the dark concerning them,. 
or condemned the innocent and applauded the guilty. 

John Fiske, 2 speaking of the persecuting spirit not yet having 
ceased to influence men's actions, says that it is no longer re- 
garded as a trait to be proud of, but seeks to hide itself under 
specious disguises. Its manifestations, too, have become corre- 
spondingly feeble. The heretic who once would have been racked, 
thumb-screwed and burned for writing an obnoxious life of Jesus 
is now only requested to resign his professorship in the college 
de France, while nobody thinks of confiscating the book or cut- 
ting off from the author his share of the proceeds of its immense 
sale. The decline of persecution is in these respects analogous 
to the simultaneous decline in the warlike spirit. Warfare, once 
regarded as the only fitting occupation for well-bred men, has 
come to be looked upon not only as an intolerable nuisance, but 
even as a criminal business, save when justified on the ground of 

" Excursions of An Evolutionist, p. 212. 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 507 

self-defence. And along with the former slaughter of captives 
it is now unfair to kill chickens of an enemy's country without 
at least professing to pay for them. There are improvements in 
the way people think and feel. Buckle claimed the race had not 
improved morally but intellectually; he thought this progress 
was due to increase in knowledge and not at all to improvement 
in ethical feeling. He notes that religious persecution has been 
the product of some of the best impulses of human nature when 
guided by an erroneous theory of duty. The wretched Corn- 
modus cared nothing for religion, but Marcus had the interest of 
religion uppermost, and in spite of a humane disposition used 
violence to suppress the heresy of Christianity. The possession 
of an exclusive dogma of salvation makes persecutors. If you 
have sole ownership of the right to heaven it is a kindness to 
torture or even kill your neighbor to save his soul. 

The sword is no longer in the equipment of a gentleman, 
private warfare is no longer allowed, the duel is less in favor 
and the sportsman is being hedged with rules. A sort of femi- 
nine softness is coming over the people as they shrink from the 
disagreeable. He is so merciful to himself that he could not bear 
to hear of an insane person being kicked to death in an asylum, 
and hopes some one will do something about it. He even shrinks 
from seeing cattle slaughtered by, the butcher, but his imagination 
is not exercised in vain regrets when he eats what the butcher has 
killed for him. 

The slave-making desire is observable in the attempt to domi- 
neer over persons intellectually in asserting the correctness of 
one's own opinion over all others'. Children squabble over ques- 
tions of no consequence and warm into calling each other hard 
names, and finally pound each other. 

We may safely infer from the tenacity of the ignorant to 
whatever notion it may have acquired as the only correct one, 
and his readiness to destroy you for doubting that opinion, that 
lowly organized men whether aborigines, savages, Russian mou- 
jiks, Spanish peasantry, or the uninformed in the neglected parts 
of great cities have an inborn, inherited disposition to act upon 
their convictions, however obtained, and to resent any attempt 
to call such convictions into question. From this it may be seen 



508 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

how priestcraft and demagoguery work so successfully ; cither 
the opinions are instilled beforehand and adroitly made use of 
by the designing or they are hammered into the passive people 
incapable of thinking for themselves. In either event the tribe, 
band, society, church, etc., may fight to maintain whatever opin- 
ion is adopted, and dislike opponents as the savage does, and 
for identical reasons. His conceit is wounded by anv intimation 
that he is not a god. Even the scientific man flushes with resent- 
ment when his pet theories are scoffed at. He has been known to 
resort to revenge upon his adversary for refusing to quote him. 
A compiler of medical works went over a revision of a large 
periodically published volume and carefully expunged the names 
of all confreres who refused to worship at his shrine and laud 
him for abilities he did not possess. 

A man with small knowledge of chemistry found gold with 
antimony and concluded that the antimony had been converted 
into gold. He advertised to sell stock in his process to enable him 
to buy antimony, and finally fled when he discovered his error. 
Any chemist could have told him of his mistake, but he would 
not listen to one, nor did the stockholders think of consulting 
a chemist before investing. If his claim was a fact and his 
process the correct one gold could have been manufactured. 

But even those who spend a lifetime in the study of a subject 
may overlook some important fact or show bad judgment. The 
crude mind on this becoming known jumps to the conclusion that 
there is nothing in science. Experts sometimes lie, and the aver- 
age juryman thinks therefore that all experts do so, and it would 
be best to have ignorance only to trust. Ignorance is most often 
as untrustworthy, and the cause of expert lying in the court is 
not traced to its real source, the fact that liars mainly are the 
fittest to survive in such service because the lawyers, the judge 
and the law proceedings suppress truth, all too often, the wit- 
ness is sworn to tell ''the truth, the whole truth and nothing but 
the truth," and forthwith the lawyers on both sides extract from 
him only what colors their particular side and prevent him from 
telling the whole truth and the judge sustains their methods and 
would fine the witness for contempt or send him to jail if he in- 



THE I\ I I I I Ia II AI. I AC I I. TIES. 509 

sisted upon telling the whole truth. And lawyers do not always 

care to have a too truthful witness. 

Lite itself may be said to be a process of problem solving, 
and the more logically the body adapts itself to the environment 
the better the health and happiness, and if the brain is developed 
to enable the better adjustment then that organ but continues the 
process that the body of the lowest organism more or less im- 
perfectly attempts. Nature defeats the solution of the life prob- 
lem by death, so the best solution possible is the possible one for 
the highest developed brain to do the best it can with life. And 
various are the interpretations of this from living wholly for 
one's self to living wholly for others. The logic of life is com- 
pound, as the conditions are so many and so complex; no set of 
syllogisms can serve as the logic of life. The body assumes that 
an article is fit to eat and a mistake may cost sickness or loss of 
life, so it has to secure true premises in such matters, for the 
second and third terms will be impossible, for instance : poison 
is assumed as good to eat, arsenic is poison and the rat ate some. 
If the rat had time to draw any inference it would be that he was 
mistaken in his premise. The fact of the matter is the best part 
of logic is in securing truthful data to start with, and all the 
other processes can pretty well take care of themselves. Science 
or the better knowledge of things affords the best means of secur- 
ing correct premises, in spite of so many methods being false 
sciences. 

Induction, deduction and consistency have all a basis of fact 
or they are worthless. 

The brain is most often a wretched problem solver, for it too 
often puts the cart before the horse. A sudden emotion is stirred 
and consciousness becomes aware of it, and the mind inverts the 
order. 

Belief is often absurdly considered to be proof. The senile 
dement believes in the scoundrel who robs him, the betrayed 
woman believed in her betrayer, the man who believed the gun 
was not loaded blew his brains out. Spain believed it could whip 
America, the Mohammedans believe they will convert and control 
the earth. 

Conditions are incessantly being mistaken for things. That is 



5IO THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

when a man jumps, the jump as well as the man is considered to 
be a solid tangible affair. It is difficult for people to realize that 
sound, heat, light, electricity, motion in general, taste, smell, 
touch, gravity, chemical power and so on, are mere jumps, that 
modes of motion are not things but conditions of things. When 
this sort of elementary physics once gets into the brains of biolo- 
gists, doctors, philosophers and others they have taken great 
strides toward knowing a little about the universe. As people do 
not know the horse from the kick, they have trouble in correct 
reasoning. 

The subject-matter of logic is no part of a logical system ; 
that is, the things dealt with are merely the materials used for 
the time being by the system. Logic may be regarded as the 
simple reasoning process by which we pass from truth to truth, 
already found, and by which we guard against false arguments 
in such a passage. It has nothing to do with words but the ar- 
rangement of words into propositions and arguments ; not with 
their meanings, but with the process of reasoning or passing from 
two known and acknowledged judgments to a third which is de- 
rived from their combination. 

It is argued that since men reason, and reason well, without 
rules and without knowing the process, that a system of rules 
must be unnecessary. Many children speak with correctness and 
precision before they have any knowledge of grammar, and there 
are persons w T ith wonderful arithmetical ability who have never 
learned arithmetic, good musicians who do not know the notes, 
but grammar, arithmetic and musical rules are not to be con- 
demned because there are a few who do not need them. 

"Many persons of clear perceptive faculties, and who form and 
combine their judgments rapidly, may reason acutely and well 
without a system of rules, but in order to be certain of their cor- 
rectness others must have some invariable test ; on the other hand 
there are many of quick but erratic minds who reason with such 
dangerous sophistry that the most delicate logical tests can expose 
the fallacy of which, indeed, they may not themselves be entirely 
aware. As such delicate tests have not been within the reach of 
the multitude it is thus that men have become, for want of pop- 
ular knowledge of logic, at once self-deceivers, and deluders of 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. S 11 

mankind, have established illogical religious creeds, monstrous 
social fallacies, false theories of government, which are imme- 
diately made manifest by the simple application of logic." 3 

The bias of prejudice, distortion of passion, or insidious temp- 
tation into error, swaying of self-interest, partisanship, fashion, 
imagination, cause ordinarily clear minds to draw different con- 
clusions from the same premises. At different periods of life 
men will reason differently, so it is evident that natural logic is 
an insufficient guide to reason. But by observing all these things 
that influence reason and trying to conceal them enables us to 
avoid much false reasoning. 

There can be but one kind of logic applicable to all matters ; 
thus a good mathematician applies logic to the investigation of 
numbers and quality, a good general logically grasps a situation, 
etc. 

Methods of investigation are by analysis, taking apart, or 
synthesis, putting together. In studying nature we first describe 
things, and then experiment with them, to see what thing's do ; 
these stages are called the descriptive and the inductive ; then 
follows the deductive or exact stage, that of devising some sort 
of conclusion or opinion with regard to things and what they do. 

When we learn about things the next step is to collect them 
and their workings into general laws, and deduce from these 
things and how 7 they behave further instances, or consequences, 
or predictions ; this process is the descriptive, inductive and de- 
ductive. 

One logician demands that we believe nothing without proof, 
which is a safe enough rule if we could always prove things. 
Many things we have to take on trust from statements of others, 
and we do not always find our confidence misplaced, but we can 
make a distinction between direct and indirect testimony and be- 
lief founded on satisfactory evidence or on mere hearsay. 

The avoidance of ambiguity is one of the most important rules 
of logic. Be sure you understand your subject before you can 
expect to make clear inferences from it. Xever use a word you 
do not fully understand and avoid those likely to mislead. If you 
get into the bamboozling habit and are content to merely appear 

3 Elements of Logic, Henry Copee. 



512 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

to know things yon will end by cheating yourself, blinding your 
reason and by thinking lies. 

Reasoning consists in the combination of two known judg- 
ments to form a third, and when expressed in language is called 
argument. 

The simplest form of argument is the syllogism, but in an ex- 
tended sense reasoning combines many arguments. 

An essential definition presents the principal parts of the es- 
sence of the thing defined, as a steamboat is something that con- 
sists of hull, engine, etc., this being a physical essential definition,. 
the logical essential definition would be the genus as an ocean- 
vessel and differentiation of peculiar build. 

A nominal definition gives the meaning of the term tele- 
scope to view far off, photograph a picture made by light. 

A real definition would require a treatise of description of 
what is to be defined. 

As words are only symbols having no exact equivalents in 
phenomena, it is evident that a precise definition is impossible, 
only approximate definitions can be constructed. Any definition 
is assailable, and vast labor and time has been wasted in attempts 
to define such things as sanity, insanity, sickness, health, etc. 

A definition should seek clearness, adequacy, sufficiency of 
words. 

Physical division is separation into parts as an oak into trunk, 
branches, and those into bark, leaves, etc. Logical division sepa- 
rates genus into species and these into individuals. Mankind can 
be divided into races, creeds, nations. 

A fallacy is an invalid argument which appears at first sight 
to be valid. If used with intent to deceive the fallacy is a 
sophism. 

There are fallacies in dictione and extra dictionem, fallacies 
of form or diction and in the subject matter. 

Material or non-logical fallacies arise from the ambiguity of 
words, and are therefore called verbal fallacies, and that very 
designation is capable of misunderstanding between fallacies of 
materials and a fallacy that is important or material. Formal fal- 
lacies are undistributed middle terms, illicit process of either 
term, negative premises, affirmative conclusions from negative 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 513 

promises, or vice versa, more than those terms in the argument. 

Material or informal fallacies have conclusions that are cor- 
rect from the premises, but the ambiguity or falsity of the mate- 
rials dealt with in the premises and conclusions is to blame for 
these kind oi fallacies. 

The simplest division of material fallacies are into those hav- 
ing- errors in the premises or in the conclusions. 

Errors in the premises are technically named the petitio prin- 
cipii, or begging the question ; arguing in a circle ; non causa 
pro causa, or the assignment of a false or undue cause. These 
branch into minor divisions. All these grow out of false or 
undue assumption of premises ; they are akin to each other, and 
are often confused. 

I. Petitio principii : Using the same fact, in other w r ords to 
support a conclusion, as morphine causes sleep because it is a 
narcotic, equal to saying that morphine causes sleep because it 
causes sleep. Languages with many synonyms abound in this 
fallacy. 

II. Arguing in a circle is finding a premise to prove an as- 
serted conclusion, and then when asked for proof, trying to make 
the conclusion prove the premise, or increasing the circle by a 
third proposition which depends upon the conclusion, and jug- 
gling with these as with balls, one of which is in the air, but which 
it is difficult to tell. Working out the syllogism detects the fal- 
lacy. 

Mohammed's revelations are true. 
The Koran is Mohammed's revelation. 
Therefore the Koran is true. 

III. Xon causa pro causa : Here the reason or cause as- 
serted in the premises have nothing to do w T ith the conclusion. 
Assigning a cause when it is not, and secondly, the assumed pre- 
mises cannot be proven to be true as a cause, and may therefore be 
considered false. 

"Think you not," said Charles II. to Milton, ''that the crime 
which you committed against my father must have been very 
great, seeing that heaven has seen fit to punish it by such severe 
loss as that which you have sustained?" "Nay, sire," Milton re- 
plied, "if my crime on that account be adjudged great, how much 



5H THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

greater must have been the criminality of your father, seeing that 
I have only lost my eyes, but he his head ?" 

Eclipses are regarded by the ignorant as portending war and 
famine, and when they happen to come together they are related 
as cause and effect. This is the post hoc ergo propter hoc fal- 
lacy that besets undisciplined minds and induces them to ascribe 
a cure to a patent medicine when they know nothing of diseases, 
cures or remedies. 

Errors may lie in the conclusion, as Alfred the Great was a 
scholar because he founded the University of Oxford, when all 
that could be affirmed would be that he was a patron of learning. 

Polemics contain much of this self-deceiving and deceiving 
others. A species of this is the argumentum ad hominem or the 
unfair appeal to personal opinions or to one's vanity or prejudice. 
The argument may close with "Well, you would not do so !" The 
argumentum ad populum is the appeal to popular prejudice. 
Demagogues use this fallacy constantly, and where the sophistry 
is evident to an educated mind the mob is delighted with its un- 
reasonableness. Revolutions often proceed on these lines. A 
third kind of irrelevant conclusion is the argumentum ad vere- 
cundiam or appeal to the modesty of our opponent, hoping that 
he will not attack respected authorities and time-honored cus- 
toms, enabling conservatism to become gross, obstinate error. 

Sterne suggests also the argumentum ad baculinum or argu- 
ment of the club, in "Tristram Shandy," and a ferociously power- 
ful argument it has been in the world. It has torn down and es- 
tablished nations and, as Darwin says, it has instituted such things 
as virtue. 

Appeals to the nature of the thing itself and to individual 
judgment are legitimate, but changing the point in dispute is an 
argumentative trick and some contest may resolve itself into prov- 
ing something that no one has denied. 

The fallacy of objections consists in asserting, for example, 
that since there are objections to science, that science is false. Ir- 
relevant conclusions are the standing sophisms of debate and, leg- 
islative contest. One person will wander about in a discussion, 
another will lose the point in question, another is taken up with 
little details with no bearing on the subject, and a third mistakes 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 515 

the fine and delicate points of the argument, some become angry 
and lose reason and temper together, or overpowered by the truth 
and logic opponents, appeals to prejudices and interests of their 
audience ; others resort to ridicule of the person or cause. The 
master mind seeks to bring things back to the main issue and to 
confine them there. 

Verbal fallacies — ambiguous or equivocal meanings of words 
— a line for instance is a cord, a few words, a military term ; a por- 
ter is a drink and a gate-keeper. 

I. Etymology. Words change in their meanings from one 
period to another. 

II. Fallacy of Interrogations. Using two or more terms in 
a question that requires two distinct answers, the ambiguity being 
in the single answer. One question implies another. Thus a tem- 
perate man may be asked when he gave up drinking, implies that 
he drank. It is called fallacia plurimum interrogationum, is made 
more subtle by the number and closeness of resemblance of the 
points included in the sentence. 

III. Amphibolous Sentences. The ambiguity lies in the con- 
struction, so that by different punctuations we have double and 
opposite meanings. The Delphian oracles cultivated this knav- 
ery, so that whatever happened they could claim to have pre- 
dicted it. 

The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous is as 
brave as a lion, has been remodeled by placing commas after the 
words flee, and righteous, omitting the one after pursueth and 
changing flee to flea. 

Tossing meanings from one sentence or word to another is 
amphibolous. 

Words may have two or more meanings by resemblance, 
ambiguity, analogy, association, ellipsis, accident, as dove-tail, 
arm-chair, sweet sound, good shot (as a person or article or 
effect), we speak of Scott when we mean his works or his person. 
The word light is opposed to heavy and dark and may in con- 
duct be applied to the opposite of serious or dignified. Ambigu- 
ity may lie in the context. Playing upon the words nothing and 
nowhere used as adjectives enable another fallacy of composition. 



516 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

No cat has two tails, every cat has one tail more than no cat, every 
cat has three tails. 

To remove ambiguity demand definitions — even a nominal 
definition will answer. 

Sweeping generalizations are fallacious and so are the uses 
often made of probabilities, which are taken as certain, and losses 
are occasioned in gambling by a wrong use of the matter of prob- 
able chances. 

Popular fallacies may pervade vast numbers of people from 
which it is treason to dissent. Error may pervade an age which 
the next age may remove, false principles cling to the masses 
w 7 hich the philosopher observes but cannot change. Irrelevant 
conclusions are often of this nature. 

I. Among common popular fallacies is that which forbids 
anything but good to be said of the dead. One means of fostering 
this is the superstition that the dead, no matter how unworthy ,. 
may do the living a favor. De mortis nil nisi bonum. 

"The same man," says Jeremy Bentham "who by praising you 
when dead would have plagued you without mercy when living/' 
A dead man cannot be a rival. Rivalry is stronger among ac- 
quaintances. 

II. De gustibus non est disputandum is used to stop con- 
troversy by indicating that different views need not be reconciled. 
Each has his own taste. Standards may be secured to which both 
may agree. 

III. Patriotic prejudice. That of assuming one's own par- 
ticular government as the best. The Russian, Englishman and 
American knows he has the best government. Utopian schemes 
of government show how absurd "nature menders" become. 

Governments are often suited to the people who endure them, 
a despot is needed for barbarians and a republic may exist among 
the higher civilized classes. 

IV. Sweeping classifications : 

"The crimes of kings," meaning Louis XVI., while he was the 
best of them. 

"The cruelties of the Catholics." 

"Protestant intolerance," during James IL's time. 



THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 517 

V. No precedent argument, and as there was no complaint 
it must be good. 

VI. Diversion to personalities, laudation, abuse, etc. 

VII. Party compulsion, to follow a leader merely because he 
is of your political party. Right or wrong fallacy. 

Those who dare think for themselves and protest are turn- 
coats, traitors, fickle, unreliable. 

Self interest and not truth is the aim and slavery results. 

Copee says : ''Birds fly ; this is true of birds universally, and 
we have the right to prefix the sign all, which denotes it an uni- 
versal proposition." 

Showing that a logician may be a poor naturalist and that 
the logical mind does not impart ability to recognize facts un- 
known previously. The apteryx, the dodo, penguin, emu and 
ostrich are birds that do not fly. 

Greeneaf, on ^'Evidence," remarks that webbed feet are evi- 
dence that a bird is aquatic, unaware that the webbed foot Pekin 
duck drowns if it gets in water and dislikes to have its feet wet. 

One, it is said, preferred to be right than consistent. "Con- 
sistency is Truth," says Edgar A. Poe, but we have to use care 
about consistency, for it changes as truth does sometimes. He 
regards the deductive as a priori and the inductive as 
a posteriori methods of reasoning and in suggesting that the syl- 
logism is not the only means of ascertaining truth and recom- 
mending the test of consistency as the only one, Poe says the syl- 
logism crawls while the consistency test flies. "Because the tor- 
toise is sure of foot for this reason must we clip the wings of the 
eagle." 

Axioms do not exist, he contends, because there is no ultimate 
knowledge. 

The commonest blunder is accepting some as all, the next 
most frequent is false association, and the worst of all is blindly 
accepting "authority." . 



CHAPTER XVI. 
MENTAL DISEASES. 

Condensing from the chapters on causes and pathology in my 
Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity, the main factor in insanity is 
in a constitutional taint, the mental machinery may be said to be 
rickety, so that comparatively little things put it out of gear, such 
as troubles, worry, excitement, some bodily diseases and even 
child birth or the development crises of puberty and age. Al- 
cohol and heredity are the main causes usually in connection with 
other matters. Diseases may be severe enough of themselves to 
induce insanity. Perverted circulation as when the blood current 
is too slow or too fast may set up depressed or exalted states, the 
cramping of blood vessels in different parts occasion hysterical 
symptoms and in epilepsy the circulation is badly disturbed. In- 
terference by compression which cuts off the blood supply to brain 
parts produces various mental and bodily defects. Auto-toxsemias 
the retention in the system of effete materials accounts for neural- 
gias, melancholias, delirium, hysteria and the furies of insanity 
generally. Brain deformities, as in idiocy, or after an injury to 
the head, or a disease, such as scarlatina, often profoundly modify 
the brain workings. Nutritional faults are the general results of 
all these causes. 

Alcohol poisons the blood and nervous systems, which regulate 
mental and physical adjustment of means to ends. Man is not 
the only alcohol-drinking animal. Chickens and ducks can be- 
come addicted to liquor and neglect food for its sake. Buffon 
tells of a wine-drinking chimpanzee and Brehm of mandrils that 
regularly drank wine. Decayed fruit may cause cattle to become 
drunk, oxen and cows have been seen drunk in orchards ; they 
stagger, and grow sleepy. Animals are susceptible to drunken- 
ness in proportion to their intelligence. Elephants are fond of 
liquor of all kinds and rats gnaw the staves of casks to get at the 

518 



MENTAL DISEASES. 519 

contents. Cats do not seem so much inclined to drink alcoholics. 
The parrot is a prime toper. Swarms of bees have become help- 
lessly drunk on the poisonous linden nectar, and fishes have be- 
come suicidally drunk from alcohol in their water. 

The entire animal kingdom has suspiciousness and apprehen- 
sion as a fixed instinct, stronger in some species than in others, 
stronger in some races than in others according to localities and 
what the people had to combat or to fear. Dread, care, apprehen- 
sion are human heritages, modified by circumstances, always ready 
to develop if occasion demands, or if the mind fails to correct un- 
pleasant sensations sufficiently. Habit can intensify apprehen- 
sion. Incessant worry about the future makes dwelling upon pos- 
sible misfortune a normal average state. Age may intensify these 
fears and the dissolution of the normal relations of the intellect 
caused by insanity may further increase dread into delusions of 
persecution owing to the mental integrity being absent that for- 
merly corrected these feelings. 

Some persons seem to be naturally suspicious, as Beethoven, 
who, though continuing to compose music, grew^ more suspicious 
as his deafness increased. In such cases the difficulty of under- 
standing what was going on about him contributed to the appre- 
hension, while a normal mind becomes reconciled to deafness. 

Suggestion to the mind seems to be the starting point of many 
delusions. The cold legs due to a bad circulation may suggest 
to the hypochondriac that his legs are made of glass. The catalep- 
tic muscular tension of katatonia suggests to the mind the stagy 
behavior, just as a good circulation suggests vigor, hopefulness 
and cheeriness. Visceral states may involuntarily awaken emo- 
tions and even motor reflexes. If the heart starts to beat very 
rapidly by some mechanical nervous and vascular cause, which 
at the same time disables the mind from recognizing the mere 
fact as being caused in some unknown way, then the enfeebled in- 
tellect assumes the readiest explanation at hand, that of being 
persecuted, or bewitched, or electrified, etc. 

In some logically insane there are spots of gray matter 
out of place in the brain, with inevitable erratic reflexes or be- 
havior different from that of ordinary persons. There is a ten- 
dency in some of these to seek the meaning of signs, omens, sym- 



520 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

bols ; they are mystics, and attach importance to many silly simple 
affairs. One at the county insane asylum studied the engravings 
on dry goods labels and assigned mysterious importance to scroll 
work. This mysticism appears like a reversion to primitive sav- 
age states of mind when the heavens and earth were full of mys- 
tery and things to fear and to propitiate. This inclination to 
mysticism or to interpret symbols foolishly belongs to a certain 
stage of brain development, that of the age of the race corres- 
ponding to childishness. Most superstition originated in the 
childish periods of races. Inclination to mystery is in every child 
and sometimes is not outgrown, attracting those who take ad- 
vantage of such simple-minded persons. 

The cause of marital infidelity delusions of the alcoholic is that 
his lowered mentality at the time disables him from judging by 
his later acquired intelligence; he goes back thousands of years 
in ideas and thinks as the pirate and savage of old did. This is 
the best possible interpretation of the extremely common asser- 
tion of alcoholic insane persons that their wives were unfaithful 
to them. In some cases of recovery, which does not occur often, 
these patients have denied any recollection of such accusations. 

Delusions that parts of the body are gone could arise from 
loss of sensation in such parts. 

Delusions of being two persons could occur when the person 
had an hallucination of seeing himself walking about, while he 
at the same time realized that he was also in bed. The touch 
:2nse was sane, but the optic affected. 

Suspicion being a characteristic of all wild animals, it also 
appears in many diseases of the mind, such as melancholia, phthis- 
ical insanity, paranoia, hysterical insanity, whose special intelli- 
gence integrity does not control the generalized basic emotions. 
The delusion of persecution is the natural consequence of mil- 
lions of years of hostile surroundings, in savage and animal inher- 
itances. The depressed feeling, apprehensions, etc., so natural in 
sickness and even in ordinary health to most persons due to this 
"organic memory" of past remote ages, when enemies were to be 
evaded or fought. Delusions of grandeur in destructive brain 
diseases come from blunted ability to feel pain, fatigue or care, a 
sort of mental anaesthesia and the rapid oxygenation of mania 



MENTAL DISEASES. 5 2 I 

like a stage of alcoholic intoxication also imparts a similar feeling 
of well-being. The poisoned circulation fully accounts for the 
misery of melancholia and the enfeebled intellect misinterprets 
the causes of the discomfort. 

The feeling of unworthiness that is merely exaggerated in 
melancholia is normal in many otherwise sane persons and has 
in all likelihood come down to them naturally from oppressed 
•ancestry. Many extra meek people act as though nothing was 
their due ; timidity seems born in them, a race of beggars or slaves 
could transmit such feelings. One feels in the way, must not 
oversleep, must not bathe for fear some one else might need the 
bathing room, must not eat too much, for others might want it. 
A slave idea may have thus come down through abuse of one's 
ancestry. 

Illusions are misconstrued perceptions comparable to the sub- 
stitution of one word for another, metaphasia, paraphasia, the 
wrong reflex being excited, so the wrong imagery or sound may 
be recalled in illusions, or the wrong causes may be assigned to 
the impression. In hallucinations the brain memory centres are 
excited by some internal cause, in illusions the cause is merely 
misinterpreted. 

Optical illusions are numerous, confusing past with present 
appearances, immediate sensory data with residua of past expe- 
riences, subjective with objective, and the remembered with the 
actual, dreams with waking experiences. 

Life is full of illusions of all the senses, beyond such things 
as rainbows, moon-dogs and sun-dogs, one of which founded the 
story of the Constantine apparition. The perspective is an il- 
lusion, and comets are mere sun reflections upon aggregations of 
meteorites, and astronomers are slow to accept the simplest ex- 
planation of such things, just as Galileo's, Copernicus' and Kep- 
ler's ideas were rejected by the star observers of their day. 

Hallucinations and illusions as in dreams are invoked memo- 
ries without the ability to discriminate between the real and false. 
Nightmare and dreams generally are more or less hallucinations 
or illusions ; that is, baseless or misinterpreted perceptions. 

Hallucinations are but memories aroused subjectively in the 
absence of external causes, the illusions being also memories 



522 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

aroused for which there is an external, objective, but mistaken, 
cause, or the memory mistakes the impression. 

The hallucinations of delirium are associated with the blood 
perversions of fever causing unwonted imagery and brain im- 
pressions generally. 

Many visceral derangements, temporary or permanent, or- 
ganic or functional, suggest emotional states to the mind, peculiar- 
ly so in hypochondria and melancholia, and rapid pulse and brain 
oxygenation characterizes mania. The volubility and excitement 
is directly due to interference with the normal visceral functions, 
and the brain is the last organ to be affected. 

Hallucinations may be called memories which by their vivid- 
ness may be mistaken for sensation. Some irritation of the centre 
for the memory is involved. In illusions the wrong memory is 
roused, a sort of twisted apperception; the present arouses the 
wrong past in recollection. So in a disordered brain a memory 
may become so vivid as to be mistaken for a reality. 



CHAPTER XVII. 
CHARACTER. 

Those who try to know the hearts and read the faces of their 
fellow-men, whether from sordid or better motives, often find 
good and evil so mingled as to upset any extreme theory of hu- 
man actions. No matter how often the merchant is cheated he 
may feel that all men are not liars and thieves. Nor could he 
conclude from the many honest people he meets that all men are 
upright by nature. Finding also that many whom he thought to 
be knaves or honest turned out to be otherwise, he will, if he is 
large-minded, infer that there are no off-hand tests, or, if he is 
small in mind, which is too often the case, he is more apt to sus- 
pect all to be deeply selfish and fail to observe the frequent proof 
of the very reverse, or he may account for uprightness as due to 
a weak mind. And seldom does he include himself as subject to 
the rules he may apply to others. 

Then, though mercy prompted the legal maxim, in use in 
English speaking countries, that "all men are to be considered 
innocent until proven to be guilty," business interests could not 
safely regard all men as honest till proven dishonest, and no mat- 
ter what pretense is made the busy world is forced to hold to the 
reverse. 

From such facts it may seem that a science of character could 
not be built up, but new methods of thinking out such problems 
belong to this century, and by patient and proper study of the 
brain and mind, and their origin, we will have a vastly more cor- 
rect knowledge of such matters. 

"All men are bad" is the often made assertion of the woman 
who has had unfortunate experiences, but the one happy in the 
possession of a faithful mate smiles at the statement and is apt to 
make sweeping inclusions of an opposite nature. 

A cynic looks only upon the evil everywhere, another sees only 

523 



524 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

good abounding, and it is this latter person who is rudely shocked 
by treachery of trusted friends, and who as he grows old may 
finally develop a suspicion of everyone, particularly of those least 
deserving it. 

Turning from the pettiness of the many whom we daily meet 
to the records of such patriots as Washington, Sobieski, Garibaldi, 
and such self-sacrificing enthusiasts as Xavier, be Smet, John 
Brown, and hundreds of others who could be named, as placing 
themselves at naught and principles as foremost, we see some- 
thing we call noble in human nature and marvel at its appearance 
in a world apparently based upon wholly selfish motives. 

Alexander Pope mentioned the "man to books confined, who 
from his study rails at human kind," and between this and the too 
pleasant views of the optimist, we can steer a middle course and 
find much to admire, as well as much to regret, in the composition 
of our fellow men, and without the supercilious complacency of 
the "better-than-thou" Pharisee, we can not only forgive others, 
but learn that we have nothing to forgive in people who act out 
their natures. 

The mystery is not so great that there are brutal human be- 
ings, but whence came the excellent, the good, the sincere, the 
humane, who appear sometimes amidst feudal, piratical and other 
base people?" We know of mercenary armies laying countries 
waste, we hear of rapine, murder, slavery, cruelty, and of nations 
of liars, but have we such characters as Freytag pictured in his 
"Soil und Haben" of the merchant who kept an account with God 
and passed all profits to the credit of the deity, and acted as 
though all unfairness with his fellow-men would be punished. 

Each can recall fairly ideal persons, unselfish, kindly, honest, 
and we wonder at defects in their make-up, as though perfection 
in all things were possible. Our youthful conceptions are badly 
deranged by discovering that there are such things as "praying 
rogues and swearing saints." 

In making just estimates of character individual biographies 
are seldom of use, for but little of the real life of the person is 
recorded therein, while they contain much that is pure error, nor 
do histories of nations afford us much beyond royal rascalities 
and courtlv intrigues, narrations of wolves and foxes in high 



CHARACTER. 525 

places. The common people have not, till recently, been studied 
very much. 

It is beginning to be realized that the best people in the world 
are very often those of whom the world never heard, but current 
reputations as we find them in print may, in a general way, be just, 
and it is not necessary to imagine that all things are not what they 
seem to be, only it is best to know the reasons why things are as 
they are, and that we are not deceived in our estimates, and to 
realize that changes are liable to occur under altered circum- 
stances. 

Writers such as Charles Reade, Charles Dickens, Tolstoy and 
Ibsen bind up much acute observation of human nature with their 
narratives, and their popularity justifies the "novel with a pur- 
pose." Occasionally, even with the best of intentions, a Wilkie 
Collins will go astray in portrayals of character, and so, in the 
main, fiction, though founded on some fact, has to be carefully 
and charingly accepted as biography and history. 

Those who made personal sacrifices for opinion's sake and 
what they considered to be the welfare of large numbers of their 
fellow beings, usually to rescue them from suffering, whether the 
suffering was in this world or expected to be encountered in an- 
other world, deserve special regard, no matter how mistaken they 
were, or what harm they may have done unintentionally. 

Hall Caine did not overdraw the bigot John Storm who was 
willing to murder the one he loved to save her soul. Storm fol- 
lowed out his belief logically and with the usual apparently incon- 
sistent result. The time-serving, pompous bishop and the truck- 
ling hospital officials are also well described. Unforgiving, hard, 
cruel, grasping. All in the name of Christ. 

The olden so-called sciences or philosophies like alchemy, 
magic, and so on, were based upon the desire to take advantage 
of the people in various ways, to control and rob them of money 
or time or life. As science becomes more exact a desire for 
learning for its own sake is substituted, and the object of 
study ceases to be base. Finally the missionary spirit finds in 
science scope for its fullest exercise, and realizes that great good 
to multitudes will follow from patient research, and its application 



526 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

to an amelioration of human conditions. Nowhere will this be 
more evident than in the future insane asylum. 

Criminologists investigate the lower social strata for stigmata 
of degeneracy, neglecting the respectable who places himself 
above the law. 

Governor Hazen S. Pingree of Michigan, in a speech to the 
Nineteenth Century Club in New York, said : 

"I have found it necessary,- and continually practiced it, to 
pull the screens wide open in front of every man who was doing 
dirty work, to call him by name, and show up his schemes in the 
newspapers. It is your so-called respectable people who are the 
most dangerous. Their cloak of eminent respectability hides them, 
and people hardly believe you when you show them up, especially 
when they are church members or carry long faces. My experi- 
ence is that those who stand foremost in the synagogue and utter 
long prayers of a Sunday and engage the rest of the week in 
bribing aldermen or getting up stock jobbing schemes to defraud 
widows and orphans are the most dangerous members of society. 
Good municipal government is impossible while valuable fran- 
chises are to be had and can be obtained by corrupt use of money 
in bribing the people's servants. The people must be kept awake 
or the thief slips in." 

Between the two social extremes, the very wealthy and the 
very poor, exists a multitude of workers, many of whom are so 
routinized, so differentiated, habituated to honest methods that 
a proposal to better their fortunes by what they have grown to 
regard as dishonest means shocks them and is resented. Though 
many who practice such means would be surprised that they 
should be regarded as dishonest. There are straightforward toil- 
ers in abundance in this world who could not be induced to depart 
from honest ways. They are organized by habit, heredity and 
surroundings and would be most unhappy if tempted to surrender 
their customs. Yet these are the same Simians from whom came 
the cruel and rapacious, showing that human nature is capable 
of wonderful modifications but requires long periods of time. 
Nature menders expect to make the metamorphoses in a few 
3 r ears through some optimistic system built upon inducing every 



CHARACTER. 



5 2 7 



man to be honest. The guillotine would have to be set to work 
if rapid elimination of dishonesty is to be secured, otherwise there 
must be patient waiting- for the effect of influences operating 
through thousands of years before radical changes can be effected, 
and then unforeseen consequences must attend such modifications. 

It is a common supposition that intelligence increases morality. 
Buckle shows that this is far from the truth. Intelligence changes 
the character of knaveries, eliminating the vulgar kind and substi- 
tuting the refined. . An unintelligent man is apt to betray his 
meanness but the educated one has learned to conceal his baseness, 
or even to go to the extreme of pretending to be better than he 
is. Ignorance and lowness may co-exist but the one is not neces- 
sary to the other, for we find well-meaning ignorant and intelli- 
gent rascals. Education often improves the means for low natures. 
A very high intelligence, however, is apt to take no pleasure in 
haseness, as a perverse nature is blind to truths intelligence is ca- 
pable of appreciating. The higher mind sees a higher expedi- 
ency. 

Fear of punishment or vengeance, superstition, sympathy, the 
feeling of shame and of honor and justice make many a character 
better. As ostracism is the penalty of dishonor at times the 
feeling that one is- an honorable man is a strong deterrent from 
doing wrong. 

As Schopenhauer claims, good acts have as incentives self 
interest, kept in the background, hope of reward, the desire to 
help, for we may need help ourselves. He did not believe in a 
sense of duty, but it exists, nevertheless, and is composed of all 
the incentives creating motives to other good deeds. 

Goethe said a man may use his reason to enable him to be more 
bestial than the beast. Bacon had a fine mind but was a scoundrel. 
A person may have weak reasoning and yet have a high sense of 
morality. 

Circumstances and education, particularly early training, may 
give the direction to character, but the zest, sincerity, aggressive- 
ness, will power, energy or fierceness as well as their absence, 
with selfishness or unselfishness, come from heredity in most 
cases. While stalwartism may beget it, there are instances of fail- 



528 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ure to do so. The altruistic Abraham Lincoln left no progeny re- 
sembling him, and great leaders like Cromwell fail to transmit 
their characteristics. His son was frightened at contemplating 
the king business and declined the job. As a rule the degenerate 
sons of worthy leaders are eager to grasp the power of their 
dead father, and when the people develop intelligence enough 
they will outgrow hereditary sovereignties. 

Laziness and industry are matters of body and brain, ambition 
and integrity. A listless wealthy person is an invalid, if poor he 
is a tramp, as inebriety and drunkenness are matters of cash. 

Nutrition must be neither in excess nor defective, for when 
life is too easy, parasitism or sluggishness may occur. If too 
hard then faculties may be starved. Huxley remarked that more 
genius had been smothered by wealth than extinguished by pov- 
erty. Tropical climates tend to enervate those from colder regions. 
The need for exertion develops the highest races in the wintry 
countries. Blaming the Corsican for his passion is blaming the 
sun. Seneca claimed that difficulties strengthened the mind as 
labor does the body, so: this truism had early recognition. Long- 
fellow worded it : "In this world one must be either anvil or 
hammer" and a board of trade man summed up the fight of life 
in : "One must run with the hares or chase with the hounds." 

Interference with the ability to repay may put a debtor in a 
false light, but there are persons with constitutional inability to 
calculate properly, often unduly hopeful, causing spendthrift 
recklessness and debt accumulation. Thackeray speaks of an 
English type of gentleman who lives without work by sponging, 
usually, however, upon lordlings who in turn sponged from the 
masses. "And these fleas have still smaller fleas upon their backs 
to bite them." Parasites upon parasites. Intellect merely min- 
isters to the wants and demands of the propensities, and without 
these propensities the intellectual powers would not be exerted 
at all, says Clouston. Then biologically the brain is superim- 
posed upon the nervous system and that upon the muscular, all 
of which are to facilitate ingestion and excretion, so the highest 
intellect is merely an appendage to the intestine and most lives 
prove the propriety of this view. Were it not for development 
radically changing characters in an endlessly modifiable way as 



CHARACTER. 



5 2 9 



Spencer notes we would be puzzled to account for extreme altru- 
ists like Probasco who gave away his all, if life is based upon 
such greediness altogether. 

Roger Williams, who died in 1683, gave all to his colony. 
His son wrote that had he been a covetous man most of the 
town would have been his tenants. We call those great, says 
Knowles, his biographer, who have devoted their lives to some 
noble cause and influenced for the better the course of events. 
Measured by that standard Roger Williams deserves a high niche 
in the temple of fame among reformers. He believed in reli- 
gious liberty and democratic government and despised puri- 
tanical starchiness, pretense and humbug. He was the prophet 
of complete religious toleration in America. He was "consci- 
entiously contentious," always pleading for some magnanimous 
idea, some charity, against some wrong, for forbearance toward 
body and soul. He could do nothing by halves and, of course, 
was called "presumptuous, turbulent and seditious." Like Vol- 
taire he was always interfering with some one's vested interest 
in the profits of wrongdoing and cursed by ignorance and greed 
for helping the victims of church and state. 

Often some prominent trait will obscure all other charac- 
teristics and we fail to observe how our idols are made of clay, 
according to our conventional notions we prefer to think one is 
either wholly right or wholly wrong. Avicenna of Bokhara, 
among innumerable others, the celebrated scholar and philoso- 
pher, was as devoted to. wine and women as to learning. Daniel 
Webster had a similar character. And, by the way, character 
is often one thing and reputation another, the latter being in 
most cases a misfit. Popular opinion, to which there is such 
deference, is that of the class to which the person belongs. Pro- 
fessional or business men are guided by the views of their own 
vocations. 

Cope classes practical types of mind, under the groups mer- 
cantile, literary and scientific. The first accumulates and often 
deprives others, the second deals with the manner of things. 
Symbols are its instruments and these may be mistaken for 
things. The third counts wealth in ideas. It gives away its 
commodities for the benefit of others often without credit. A 



530 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

further inclusion of these may be into intestinal, sensual and rea- 
soning. The viscera do not deprive other body parts because 
they cannot eat everything themselves. Literary people are 
pleased with jingle of poetry, resounding phrases, bright colors, 
music, pictures. 

The desire for wealth is based directly upon the hunger de- 
sire and the money making ability is seen in many imbeciles who 
save and stint themselves for the mere purpose of accumulating. 
Those who sink every sentiment in pursuit of money are prac- 
tically hypertrophied intestines or, as usually known, are sharks. 
Achievement, work and the desire to exercise power may be 
coupled with the basic instinct and how unhappy are the retired 
accumulators. Thoughtful people resist the tendency to be 
arrogant when rich and servile* when poor. Holmes advises 
keeping in mind that you are only an atom of humanity and 
have neither vice nor virtue enough to cause you to be singled 
out for supernatural favors or affliction. Voltaire remarks : 
"We have only two days to live, it is not worth while to spend 
them in cringing to contemptible rascals." Character is often 
predetermined by inheritance that may run back a generation 
or two or revert to the remotest of savage ancestry by some fail- 
ure of development of the brain. 

A characteristic of youth is the readiness with which things 
are learned at that time. Age increases the difficulty of learn- 
ing, but the experience gained, which, after all, is something 
learned, ripens the judgment. Youth is rash, age is cautious, 
the youth is a spendthrift while' the ancient is often a miser. 
A man will be calculating, emotional, sincere, treacherous, frank, 
etc., as a summing up of inheritance and environment from 
thousands of years before he was born. Holmes says : 

"Each of us is only the footing up of a double column of 
figures that goes back to the first pair. Every unit tells and 
some of them are plus, and some minus. If the columns don't 
add up right, it is commonly because we can't make out the 
figures. I don't mean to say that something may not be added 
by nature to make up for losses and keep the race to its aver- 
age, but we are mainly nothing but the answer to a long sum 
in addition and subtraction. No doubt there are people born 



CHARACTER, 



53 » 



with impulses at every possible angle to the parallels of nature, 
as you call them. If they happen to cut these at right angles 
of course they are beyond the reach of common influences. 
Slight obliquities ar"e what we have most to do with in educa- 
tion. Penitentiaries and insane asylums take care of the right 
angle cases." 

Sancho Panza remarked: "Man is as God. made him and 
sometimes a great deal worse." 

"While all men may be created equal they don't seem to 
stay so." 

Characters are divisible into ordinary and extraordinary, any 
one of which may lack symmetry and is the product of heredity 
and circumstance subject to the modifications of age, hardships, 
affluence, disease, or drug habits, particularly that of alcohol. 

The waif develops the foxy nature naturally and may prey 
upon the community that neglected him in youth. 

In contemplating an appeal to the public to investigate and 
reform a bad political insane asylum, it occurred to me that the 
public, who were asked to do so, included people who negle'ct 
their servants, merchants who boodle by selling goods to public 
institutions and paying politicians a portion of the overcharge, 
also ministers who thunder against sin in the abstract and fear 
to go into particulars in their sermons, for boodlers are in their 
congregation. 

No aid can be had from hotel keepers who huddle a hun- 
dred girls into space for twenty, in hot rooms, with no transoms 
or windows, or from merchants who have to be compelled to 
give their saleswomen seats or decent accommodations of the 
most ordinary kind, or who give out piece-work shirts at starva- 
tion rates per dozen, and throw a lot of it on their hands and 
invent excuses to rob them, nor from those who work children 
under age and rob them of their wages. 

If character can be chronologized as pertaining to certain 
periods of the world, then such a man as the Spanish priest de 
las Casas was ages ahead of his time, as he was immeasurablv 
above his people in sympathy and rectitude. In the sixteenth 
century he denounced slavery of the Indians, and like De Smet, 
opposed their being robbed and murdered. But we more fre- 



53 2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

quently find the spirit of the middle ages earnestly advising a 
young doctor to ''fake it." His friends tell him : "You will be 
poor if honest, people like to be humbugged." Rarely does he 
hear the advice: "Preserve your self-respect at all costs." An 
energetic politician, gambler and whisky seller is adored by his 
family and immediate friends as a kind and indulgent father 
and generous, considerate friend, and yet the very means he is 
thus able to disburse are stolen from public monies appropriated 
for the poor-house and insane asylum. In this instance the 
faithfulness and sympathy extends to those most near, and not 
to others, particularly strange families or the rest of the com- 
munity. It is a stage of development in which multitudes still 
remain, a survival from worse than barbarous days. The tribal 
sympathy has not appeared that will enable the man to fancy 
suffering in the abstract or care for it in strangers. He can 
despoil others to enable him to be "generous," and a good family 
provider. 

It is reported that some fashionable clubs have developed a 
mania for tattooing. This is a natural stage of savagery and 
among criminals and degenerates, just as insanitv may be the 
approach to idiocy of too much luxury and release fro'm brain 
exercise in some of these same club members. In the" lower 
organisms parasitism takes away useless organs such as brains, 
arms, legs, eyes and so on, when the parasite gets his sustenance 
without exertion. The rule applies to man, as well, to a great 
extent. An old Spanish proverb has it : "Give your son a 
fortune and throw him in the sea." 

The child copies the world's mental development in earlier 
communities, as in lying, stealing, organizing pirate and bandit 
expeditions, loving excitement and play, in being mischievous, 
cruel and greedy. Some adults remain undeveloped beyond 
certain of these stages, as the mischief-maker, the cruel horse- 
play practical joker, the liar, the thief, and the unscrupulous 
boodler who, by robbery, directly and indirectly, causes the death 
of many sick and poor, to enable him to be good to his own 
family and friends. 

I know an instance of habitual treachery in a young man, 
who was pardoned time and again by his employer, but who 



CHARACTER. 533 

could not resist a chance to repeat his ungrateful, underhanded 
attempts to injure his employer to secure an advantage for him- 
self. Women are specifically sympathetic but not so in the 
abstract as a rule. Their imaginations do not permit them to 
realize strangers suffering. Sympathy is first aroused by expe- 
rience, next in imagining others' suffering as we did, and finally 
this feeling extends beyond those nearest to us. Eddyism de- 
stroys sympathy in denying that there is such a thing as pain, 
hence the reversion of the members of that cult to idiots. Beau- 
ties are more apt to be fickle because they realize that their 
charms are merchantable and they do not have to accept the 
first bid. 

When the wealthy invite celebrities to their parties, it is usu- 
ally to exhibit their ability to buy the curiosity, to excite the envy 
of rivals. Dr. Sam Johnson, in his immortal letter to Lord 
Chesterfield, asks if a patron is not one who looks with uncon- 
cern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has 
reached ground incumbers him with help? Schopenhauer points 
to rogues being mutually attracted and base natures find so much 
in common with others that they are never at a loss for com- 
pany. La Rochefoucauld said it was difficult to feel deep venera- 
tion and great affection for one and the same person. That 
familiarity breeds contempt is an old but proven rule. The only 
way to attain superiority is to be independent of everyone. Xo 
one is a hero to his valet and families underrate their own 
members. 

In the Introduction to Robert Chambers' "Vestiges of the 
Natural History of Creation," Henry Morley says that to un- 
derstand a man fully we must know all that he did and why each 
thing was done, how the surroundings of his life affected tone 
and thought or action, what in each instance determined action 
and what was his age, at even- stage of life, for the wisdom of 
a man of thirty-five may be the folly of a man of seventy. 

You cannot know a man unless shipwrecked with him or till 
you have seen him become rich. One who in poverty was agree- 
able in prosperity was otherwise. Every man may have his 
price, but sentiment may be the price of some, not sentimentality, 
which is a different thing. Many sincere persons look to another 



534 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

world for their price and many natures are so habituated to hug 
their principles that nothing on earth could ever take them away 
but death. 

Conceit may cause a man to live up to what the world expects 
of him and he may do right always for that reason. Vicissitudes 
have developed character as it has nations. 

The character and teachings of Christ, freed from the inter- 
pretations of the designing, just as the simple people understand 
them, appeal to the heart if there is any good therein. Even if 
these teachings have antedated Christianity they exhibit a spirit 
of dissatisfaction with evil and a desire for justice, peace and 
kindness for a community. But, as Tolstoy observes, these things 
have undergone astonishing perversions in the interests of a 
cruelly selfish priesthood and government. 

No character is wholly balanced, no one has the completeness 
imagined to be in heroes. A vain man may be justified in his 
vanity by ability. A disagreeable martinet may be far from 
empty headed. A gifted scientist has been an abominable liar 
which is all the more surprising when science begets truthful- 
ness. Spencer observes that credulity accompanies unreliability,, 
and doubt is an associate of truthfuness. 

Every trait must be regarded by itself, for a single trait, good 
or bad, may be developed in a person. It is rare for a whole 
group of characteristics tending in one way, as wholly good or 
wholly bad, to appear, so "no man or measure is wholly right or 
wholly wrong." 

Courage is not a virtue when it may be as readily the servant 
of villainy as of justice. Envy hides its hatred so as to be the 
more dangerous. When it finds a pretext it explodes with vir- 
tuous indignation. Detraction has followed superiority until 
recognition of ability became general. Dr. Nicholas Senn, the 
American surgeon, met with the opposition of his mediocre con- 
freres until his researches obtained world-wide fame. Jealousy 
prompts venomous attacks upon rivals particularly as they show 
excellence. Superiority is the unpardonable sin, in your par- 
ticular profession or business. Nor will humility save you. A 
Russian proverb is : "Make yourself a lamb and the wolf is 
readv." 



CHARACTER. 



535 



The wrecking- disposition may be so strong that one may 
be willing ti» destroy cities for loot, sink ships for salvage, derail 
trains and kill passengers for plunder, conspire to have friends 
lose fortunes for the sake of a few hundreds of dollars gain. 
This wrecking disposition in all its manifestations, from political 
boodlering down to sacking countries, dates further back to the 
grab instinct associated with merciless lack of sympathy, and is 
consequently shown by low-grade intellects, however otherwise 
"intelligent." Jesuitical inclinations may go to the extent of sac- 
rificing friends to gain what may be considered some worthy end. 

Some characters are unstable, others fixed. Some never finish 
work enthusiastically begun, others plan and persist in carrying 
out the work of years. Some are reliable under ordinary cir- 
cumstances and quick to take advantage of opportunities, as 
during the great Chicago fire or any vast popular upheaval the 
bandit spirit appears where before it was unsafe to show itself. 
There are the rash, the impulsive and the deliberate and cautious. 
Attempts have been made to classify by temperaments but such 
things are too artificial in the main. 

Holmes holds that every human being has in him stuff for 
one novel in three volumes, duodecimo. But the novelists create 
impossible characters. In their novels children talk like sages, 
the hero is powerful, rich and handsome; he swims seas, lifts 
bulls by the tail and performs other prodigies, his hair breadth 
escapes are always successful, but he never can speak the simple 
word that prevents misunderstanding and suffering. He allows 
the murderer of his father and wife to have the best hold in 
rough and tumble fight, as in Lorna Doon. He marries the most 
beautiful girl and always saves some one from drowning. 

The value of popular estimates of character appears in epi- 
curean being equivalent to gourmand when Epicurus inveighed 
against gluttony. Machiavelli described the soullessness of 
nature and is credited with applauding it. Boycott was the 
victim and not the originator of boycotting. Tom Paine was a 
lover of liberty and Voltaire was another, both of whom were 
held up to execration as irreligious and both believed in God 
and had infinitely higher conceptions of the deity than the de- 
signing who turned the ignorant against them. Draco, B. C. 



536 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

700. is accused of awarding death for all crimes when he merely 
wrote up the existing Athenian laws in an endeavor to purify 
them. General Macias was accepted by the Spaniards as having 
great mental endowments when it was the physical superiority 
that occasioned Isabella the second to raise him rapidly from 
the rank of common soldier "for extraordinary capacity." 

Probasco gave $700,000 to the city of Cincinnati, which per- 
mitted him to suffer want in his old age. 

Goethe, in Wilhelm Meister, remarks that the man who is 
born with- a talent which he is meant to use, finds his greatest 
happiness in using it, and Aristotle claimed that to be happy 
means to be self-sufficient. Schopenhauer expresses the same 
thing in saying that a high degree of intellect tends to make a 
man unsocial and that the ordinary man places his life's happi- 
ness in things external to him, so that when he loses them or 
finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is 
destroyed. Goldsmith adds his opinion in the lines : 

"Still to ourselves in every place consigned 
Our own felicity we make or find." 

Stobseus, in his exposition of the Peripatetic philosophy, says 
that happiness means vigorous and successful activity in all 
your undertakings. 

Undoubtedly conditions of stomach, heart, liver and other 
organs determine the dismal or sanguine nature as well as dark 
or bright days and the state of the weather, but Boswell digressed 
long enough from his worship of Johnson to quote a Turkish 
lady who had been educated in France, as exclaiming : "Ma foi 
Monsieur, notre bonheur depend de la fagon que notre sang 
circule." 

The influence of contact with the world in developing char- 
acter is apparent in instances where imprisonment prevented the 
mental exercise as in the cases of Casper Hauser, the son of the 
grand duke of Baden, and a Missouri case named Deitrich, both 
of these, when liberated, were practically animals without speech. 

Diseases, such as scarlet fever, small pox, diphtheria, typhoid 
fever, especially when occurring before development has taken 
place, often arrests or alters the brain structure and profoundly 



CHARACTER. 537 

moilifk-s character. I have known children to be abused at their 
homes ami in school for backwardness and stupidity when the 
discovery that the eyesight was bad and the use of spectacles 
resulted in disclosing a keenness of intellect little susp.ec.ted. Par- 
tial deafness from middle-ear disease obstructs intellectual 
growth and as the world is usually uncharitable, the sufferer is 
taken for a dunce. Increased knowledge of causes of erratic 
behavior begets charitableness. The irritability of epilepsy 
should always cause allowances to be made. We do what our 
make-up impels us to do, a certain shaped bra.in, with the co- 
operation of other organs, entails a certain character. An injury 
to the head or the rupture or plugging of an artery in the brain 
may suddenly change a character radically and for the worse, 
as when a steady, respected, aged man all at once behaves like a 
fool or criminal. Though streaks of meanness may exist natur- 
ally as where a millionaire father robs his own son who is trying 
to struggle up out of grinding poverty. I knew a man who 
stole a patent from his own boy and appropriated his earnings 
besides. Usually the father makes sacrifices to help his children. 
The primitive intestine must be too strong where there is so much 
selfishness. 

Characters differ in animals of the same species, some horses, 
dogs or monkeys being intelligent and others stupid, some sym- 
pathetic, others cruel. The fox is naturally adroit, the shark 
voracious. Sentiment cannot be denied to dogs when an old one 
may snap and snarl unnoticed at a powerful young wolf dog who 
could kill a bull dog in a minute's encounter. The strong young 
dog seems to realize the irresponsibility of the aged toothless 
one and pity his helplessness. The South American puma is 
astonishingly gentle to the human race, though fierce with other 
animals, probably due to the pumas having been domesticated by 
the ancient Peruvians. Some monkeys are sedate and others play- 
ful, the sacred monkey of India is melancholy, the mandril is 
ferefcious. Sir John Anderson says that a dark and a pale race 
of orangs may be distinguished ; a sort of Aryan and African 
color distinction. One gorilla may be gentle, though most others 
are malicious. 

The oriental mind is incomprehensible to the European. A 



53^ TIIK EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Turk will not hurt a dog from a superstitious fear to do so. 
Hindoos fear to brush flies away imagining them incarnations 
of their friends. 

The Italians have a saying that St. James put the heart of a 
fox and the fang of a wolf in a bladder and blew it up and called 
it a Spaniard. The peculiarities of other natives are ascribable 
to climate and long ages of circumstances. Those whose mar- 
riage customs admitted of the pernicious consanguine an4 very 
early mating would surely degenerate. Too much fighting and 
hardship prevented the Irish from attaining the highest develop- 
ment. They are still practically in the patriarchal stage and with 
difficulty can be tribally loyal. They do best abroad. 

Some business men fancy they can read faces and that they 
have intuitive abilities to tell character. The fact is, every one 
is an unconscious physiognomist and all of us form prejudices 
against or likings for persons because they resemble those whom 
we had occasion to dislike or like in the past. So intuition is 
merely a memory exercise, and a very unreliable one, too. Some 
carry this to the extreme of hating one who has a certain family 
name, or because he combs his hair as some scoundrel did, and 
so on. But prejudices are ingrained. We approve of method- 
ism, Catholicism, homoeopathy, allopathy, eddyism, mormonism, 
the republican or democratic party because we were raised to like 
or hate such matters and grow angry if any one tries to unsettle 
our regard. But thinking makes the head ache and we have to 
devote all our time to getting a living, or spending what we have 
made. 

The Zurich parson Lavater formulated a foolish lot of rules 
of phvsiognomy. In a general way we are impressed by faces 
as expressing certain characters, and as we grow older unlearn 
much that we thought we had known. The kind face we rever- 
enced mav with experience disgust us for its hypocricy, the ugly 
man we feared may later be loved for his good qualities. A 
large jaw is a survival from savages with great force of char- 
acter and in turn they inherited this jaw from animals with large 
muscular and bony development. Determination, not necessarily 
brutality, is indicated by the mastiff mouth for these reasons. 

As for off-hand character reading the policeman sees guilt in 



CHARACTER. 539 

every movement. The prisoner pales or flushes, he is calm and 
therefore hardened. He talks too much or is silent. All these 
are evidences of guilt to the undisciplined intellect. Detectives 
have a maxim that the honest man behaves like a guilty one 
and vice versa. None of these opinions are worth a rush. 

Precocity is not always desirable in a child as it may indicate 
tuberculosis or some latent defect which will act detrimentally 
later. Most prodigies lose their abilities and if one part of the 
brain is unduly nourished it may be at the expense of another 
part. Blindness may be associated with a prodigious auditory 
memory, in my opinion due to the extra vascularity of the hearing 
centre where the visual centre is deprived of blood. 

Even genius may have small traits as when Virchow truckled 
to ecclesiastical prejudices against the evolutionary theory and 
Cuvier snubbed Lamarck. Prof. E. D. Cope 1 has an excellent 
editorial on this unfairness, instancing an able archaeologist like 
Brinton as inconsistent and leaning to popular prejudice with 
lack of biological information and yet he could be instructive 
where his prejudices are not concerned. 

Correlation is the genius method with intense application, 
Helvetius regarded it as continued attention, but there is an 
anterior structural cause in brain and body development. Under 
genius has been grouped many diverse peculiarities and the word 
has never been satisfactorily defined. It expresses great ability 
in the main, and some regard it as different from talent. The 
matter is more fully discussed in my recent work on insanity. 2 

Voltaire wrote that : 

"Nothing: but a name remains of those who commanded bat- 
talions and fleets ; nothing results to the human race from a hun- 
dred battles gained, but the great men of whom I have spoken 
(Sully, Moliere, Lebrun, Bossuet, Poussin, Descartes, and 
others) prepared pure and durable delights for generations un- 
born. A canal that connects two seas, a picture by Poussin, a 
beautiful tragedy, a discovered truth, are things a thousand 
times more precious than all the annals of the court, than all the 
narratives of war. You know that with me, great men rank 

1 American Naturalist, Oct., 1894, p. 902. 

2 Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity, p. 843. 



54-0 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

first. I call great men all those who have excelled in the useful 
or the agreeable. The ravagers of provinces are mere heroes. 

"Every desolator of the earth began his work of massacre 
and ruin by solemn acts of religion and, while the ground still 
smoked with carnage, hastened to the temple to repeat those 
solemn acts." 

Prominent men, would be leaders of men in various ways, 
creditable or discreditable, have suffered defeat of their ambi- 
tions, but the philosopher who works calmly along, caring noth- 
ing for what the world calls success, doing what he can for the 
wilderness of apes with no expectation of appreciation, is the 
happiest. Too much success may be inconvenient, as in the in- 
stance of Du Maurier who was killed by popularity. Voltaire 
was overwhelmed by visits and exclaimed "Deliver me from my 
friends." Spencer says that those who elaborate new truths and 
teach them to their fellows are nowadays the real rulers, "the 
unacknowledged legislators," the virtual kings. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 
SOCIOLOGY. 

Man is the highest example of a social and communal animal y 
also of the solitary animal, and these two antagonistic inclinations 
are combined and result in a higher type. 

Specialism, generalization, and individualism combine to give 
great advantage, but reward without service and service without 
reward and service often with punishment, check human prog- 
ress. 

The specialism enables teaching of those who generalize, and 
thus the common unspecialized generations start off with all the 
advantages of a union of what was specialization in former gener- 
ations. 

Individualism often clashes with the inclinations of the race, 
but the race gets the benefit of the departures from the ordinary. 

The social animals preserve the individuality which communal 
animals surrender. Solitary animals are family groups only, like 
some of the Asiatics, who will not cohere in tribes which may 
merely be their own families a few generations removed. 

Charles Morris 1 includes these three grades of animal commu- 
nities, the communal, social and solitary. Among ants, bees, 
termites and beavers the specially communal has developed ; the 
individual works wholly for the community. At a lower level 
communism is so complete among the hydroid polyps that the 
community is an individual. 

A toilet sponge, when alive, is a blackish, cup-shaped, fleshy 
mass. The rotting of the animal part reveals the horny skeleton 
through the small holes through which rushes the water, convey- 
ing sustenance, and through the larger holes, or chimneys, the 
water is thrown out volcano like. Each little sponge animal has 
a whip with which it lashes the sea water inward, and millions of 

1 Man and His Ancestors, p. 81. 

54i 



54 2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

these animals merely live next to one another, in one sense soli- 
tary, in another restricted sense, social or communal, and in this 
sponge colony we have an illustration of the three forms of exist- 
ence being practically combined. Other animals in their makeup, 
their internal anatomy, are essentially the same ; that is, the cells 
composing them are solitary, while bound together, as tribes are in 
commercial relations, the entire organism existing as a society, 
and in turn the animal thus composed may be, as regards others 
of his kind, either solitary, communal or social, or still further 
combine many of the peculiarities of all three types. 

The prodigality of life can be afforded a glimpse by knowing 
that the numbers of kinds of known insects are 250,000, and this 
is about ten per cent of the total estimated number. 2 

Beavers are expert divers and swimmers, and live in com- 
munities. Different sea lion families do not associate, but wal- 
ruses rush to each other's aid when wounded, though they fight 
among themselves. The Dolphin is playful and sociable. True 
seals are very social and have a very strong affection for their 
young, differing from the eared seal. Indicatory that closely al- 
lied species may acquire radically variant sociological traits. 

Marmots live in large communities in separate burrows in 
company with owls and rattlesnakes. The brown bear is one of 
the unsociable sort. Macaws have assembling places at evening 
before settling down, like the rooks. There is significance in the 
vulture and eagle being in the same class, and both having filthy 
habits, and sometimes they are cowardly, though the eagle, only, 
is selected for national emblems. The scarlet tanager follows fine 
weather and is shy, suspicious and unsociable, probably its bright 
colors singling it out for persecution. The placing of sentinels is 
an interesting animal ability. The macacque of Barbary robs 
gardens and posts sentinels to watch. Wild horses of the Falk- 
lands keep watch over their own herd of mares and kick back 
strays into the herd. Bees have sentinels, gobies sentinel their 
nests for from six to nine days. The sea lion stands guard. ''The 
Mascarene tortoises place sentinels," according to Legua.t, "at 
some distance from their troop, at the four corners of their camp, 

2 Lankester Natural History, Vol. VI, p. 9. 



SOCIOLOGY. 543 

to which the sentinels turn their hacks and look as though on 
watch." 

A sentinel among men suffers death for neglect, and in such 
cases fear emboldens him against the common enemy, hence fear 
of the tribe may have originated the sentinel, as more to be dread- 
ed than fear of the enemy. 

Animals of many kinds are social, even distinct species may 
live together, as among some American monkeys and united 
flocks of rooks, jackdaws and starlings. Horses, dogs and sheep 
may be fond of each other, as the dog is of the man. The dog 
may be satisfied if his master is in the room and howl dismally if 
alone. 

Higher animals warn one another of danger. Wild horses 
strike attitudes, rabbits stamp on the ground, sheep and chamois 
also, sometimes whistling. The leader of a troop of monkeys acts 
as sentinel ; a sociable habit of monkeys is to search each other 
for burrs or thorns, according to Brehm, while others thought the 
search was for parasites. Hunting in packs is social. Pelicans 
fish in concert. Baboons turn over stones together, when too 
large for the strength of one, to enable getting at insects beneath. 
Social animals mutually defend each other, and where they fail to 
do so, as is the case with some men, they have not developed intel- 
ligence enough to overcome the indifference to others through 
selfishness. Bull bison drive cows and calves to the centre of the 
herd to defend them. Brehm tells of the noble rescue of a baby 
baboon from a pack of dogs at the risk of the hero baboon's life. 
Associated animals have an affection for each other which is not 
felt by the non-social, and sympathy is often poorly developed in 
some animals, as they may expel a wounded one from the herd ; 
doubtless there is individual development of sympathy here and 
there among such animals, just as de las Casas was Spanish and 
an occasional old Roman might have disliked killing his aged 
parents or deformed child. 

The North American Indians abandoned their old and invalids 
and the Fijians buried them alive if they w r ere not fit to eat. 
There are instances of an old and blind pelican being kept fat by 
its companions, and blind crows being fed by comrades. Dogs 
have occasionally sympathized with sick cats, if friendly with 



544 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

them, and a dog will sympathize with a beaten master. Baboons 
tried to protect one of their number from punishment, and a mon- 
key protected his keeper against a large baboon. Dogs possess 
some self-command, for they may refrain from stealing food in 
the absence of its master. Cats have been known to refuse food 
offered to them, but steal the same food when unnoticed. Brehm 
notes that when baboons in Abyssinia plunder a garden they 
silently follow a leader, and if an impudent young animal makes 
a noise he receives a slao from the others to teach him silence and 
obedience. 

There is evidence of the taming of horses by stone-age men, 
and that wild cattle, from which came the domesticated stock, 
were plentiful in the forests about London in 1174. Ancient 
Greeks domesticated the marten and Romans the mullet. In 
China the turtle is captured by using a sucking fish. Arabs tame 
lizards. The seal has been tamed like a dog. Falcons were used 
to catch other birds in feudal days. 

Ants enslave one another and domestication can be a species 
of slavery ; the cuckoo takes advantage of the lack of intelligence 
of other birds to make them nurses for the cuckoo young. Mon- 
keys make pets of smaller mammals. The oriole and ox-pecker 
are willing servants of the ox it rids of ticks. 

The slave-making instinct is inborn, inherited, habitual ; it is 
part of the grabbing nature which every animal shows in some 
form. When the animal evolves enough to get his living at the 
expense of other animals, he proceeds to do so. Man tries to 
make everything else minister to his comfort, and naturally tries 
to use his fellow men and women. He can be defined as a two- 
legged animal who tries to make all other animals and men serve 
him. 

"Slavery exists by the law of nature," says Aristotle, meaning 
that it was everywhere to be found. "It enabled the thinking and 
leisure class to rise," says Bagehot. 

Slaves universally, of all kinds, political, religious, and other- 
wise, are required to believe that God gave them to their masters. 

Puffendorf had taken the ground that slavery was founded on 
contract. Voltaire said : "Show me the contract, and if it is 
signed by the party to be the slave, I may believe you." 



sociology. 545 

Slavery exists from the grossest forms of body stealing to the 
more subtle forms of mental dominating, in some places abolished 
but in other places still existing. The ants still capture aphides 
and the Arabs hunt Africans. 

Both England and America passed through degrading periods 
when slavery, not alone of Africans, but, under various pretexts 
of all kinds and nationalities, even their own, were practiced. 

I personally knew a Baptist clergyman in Nashville, Tennes- 
see, whose mulatto slaves bore an unmistakable resemblance to 
him, and were recognized as his children, and when the Civil War 
broke out he was confident that the United States would succeed 
in freeing all slaves. So he sold his own children to planters liv- 
ing farther South. He suffered no loss of respect among his 
neighbors, who were aware of the financial stroke. 

In the latter years of Henry I. the practice of kidnaping men 
for the Irish slave market was in full career and formed the most 
lucrative branch of trade at Bristol. 3 A hundred years later than 
Dunstan, the wealth of the English nobles was said to have sprung 
from breeding slaves for the market. It was in the reign of the 
first Xorman king that slavery was suppressed in its last strong- 
hold, the port of Bristol. 

In 959 slavery began to be modified, kidnaping and the sale of 
children were prohibited. The slave was exempt from toil on 
Sundays and holy days. Athelstane placed free and slaves on the 
same plane of responsibility for crime. The slave trade from 
ports was prohibited, and both church and state endeavored to 
stop slavery altogether. But the decrease of slavery went on side 
by side with an increasing degradation of the bulk of the people. 
The freeman became a degraded villein, dependent upon a lord. 
In America the presence of negro slaves degraded the white 
peasants until it was proposed in earnest to enslave these white 
free men also, as they were not fit to be free. The Virginia news- 
papers of 1858 to 1862 argued in that way. 

"Christianity in the early ages never denounced slavery, but 
filled the minds of both masters and slaves with ideas utterly in- 
consistent with the spirit of slavery." 4 But the bible as taught in 

3 K. Nordgate, England Under the Augevin Kings V. I, Ch. I. 

4 W. R. Brownlow, Lectures on Slavery, Ch. I. 



546 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

the Southern States advised the slave to "be content in the lot to 
which the Lord had called him," and in other ways was expound- 
ed as justifying slavery from Christian standpoints. The Span- 
iards made use of the aboriginal Bahamans to lure them into slav- 
ery. They told them that they would take them in ships to the 
heavenly shores to meet their relatives, and 40,000 were sent to 
perish in the mines of the island of Hispaniola. Columbus spoke 
of these natives as gentle, inoffensive and always smiling. 

Bartolome de las Casas, who became a priest in 15 10, deserves 
great credit for standing alone in his denunciation of human 
slavery in the West Indies by the Spaniards. He was hated, 
thwarted and entrapped in many ways. 

The Portuguese introduced slavery into Brazil in the seven- 
teenth century, and it was not abolished until Sept. 28, 187 1, long 
after the American civil war. The terms of the Brazilian eman- 
cipation were that "the children of slave mothers were free after 
serving their owners 21 years as apprentices." A general liber- 
ation mania followed, indicating that the people were better than 
their rulers. 

Many are the pretexts for practicing slavery and various are 
the names under which it exists. Transportation, penal colonies, 
extradition, contract systems, peonage, villeinage, prisoners of 
war, apprenticeship, and so on indefinitely, all such terms are con- 
nected with slavery pure and simple, however disguised. The 
present Siberia and the island of Saghalien, colonies of Russia, 
are horrible slave regions for convicts. 

The Spaniards maintained slavery in Cuba up to the time of 
Weyler's reconcentrado slaughters. Peonage as practiced in 
Mexico, and also in New Mexico, under the United States gov- 
ernment sanction, is slavery. The Boers enslaved the Kaffirs in 
South Africa, and much of the casus belli there was the freeing 
of negroes by the English, though the Cornwall mines contain 
men, women and children who have never seen the sunlight, 
through being born and dying in Cornish coal mines. A state- 
ment that is not recklessly made. There is religious slavery of 
Doth mind and body everywhere to enable a privileged class to 
live upon the labors of the superstitious. Society permits sweat- 
shops to extract the lives of unfortunates, and there are multi- 



SOCIOLOGY. 



547 



tudes of other methods of greed being glutted at the expense 
of others. 

The Arabs steal men in Africa for the Eastern market, but 
England is making- headway against this traffic there. In A. D. 
1897 the British headed off the slave raiders into Nigeria, and 
generally through west and South Africa the trade is being sup- 
pressed. 

Under tricky contracts for labor of convicts South Carolina 
managed to restore slavery in 1901 to a great extent, even, it is 
claimed, easily convicting negroes for the sake of making slaves 
of them* 

Penitentiaries and war prison pens, some insane asylums and 
poor houses are often scenes of brutal opportunity where the 
slaves are given over to political or military masters, who, being 
unchecked, reveal their animal ferocity and often resort to abuse 
of the helpless merely as an exercise. The "Daughters of the 
Confederacy" are said to have objected to Uncle Tom's Cabin 
being read or played in the South, as it gave false ante-bellum 
ideas, such as that slaves were not kindly treated. Slavery favors 
degeneracy. It places no premium upon generosity or rights of 
others, individuality or high intelligence ; the qualities of man- 
hood, are checked. Slavery reacts badly on the masters by de- 
stroying their self-reliance. The most helpless creatures are the 
red ants, w r ho depend almost wholly upon their black ant slaves. 
Dependence lessens ability to care for self and tends to 'helpless- 
ness and loss of organs useful to the free state. Luxury de- 
grades and in tropical regions where nature furnishes ease and 
plenty the mind does not develop readily. 

There was slavery among the Hebrews of the old testament, 
and it w r as very ancient among the Greeks and Egyptians, and in 
Rome it was corrupting in the extreme. 

There was an uprising of slaves in B. C. 133 in Italy, owing 
to hunger, cold and general despair. 

It was a question whether Rome or Carthage was to afford 
the slaves to the other. Scipio levelled Carthage in B. C. 146, 
and enslaved its last inhabitant. 

During the seven days of the Saturnalia dedicated to Saturn 



548 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

in ancient Rome, slaves were admitted to equality with their mas- 
ters. 

B. C. 73 there were schools for training gladiators in which 
there were slaves, abandoned waifs, criminal prisoners and un- 
fortunates generally. Spartacus led seventy escapes from the 
school at Capua, and gathered a large force of slaves with which 
he defeated the Roman armies. Finally Spartacus and 35,000 of 
his insurgents were slain^ 6,000 of them being crucified by Pom- 
pey. In Gaul slavery of captives was the rule, and under Rome 
became more systematized and oppressive. Some broke out into 
brigandage with the free men whose lot was as bad as the slaves- 
Free may be a mere catch word and not really exist. 

In 1085 William of Normandy abolished the death penalty 
and the slave trade. He loved hunting so much that he swept 
away villages to make parks for his deer and thousands of peas- 
ants were made homeless. He had sixty-eight of these forests. 
The New Forest in Hampshire was the sixty-ninth, and occa- 
sioned the greatest suffering. So it is not likely that his aboli- 
tion of slavery had any reference to humane considerations. 

In A. D. 1 100, like all the great revolutions of society, the ad- 
vance from serfage w r as a silent one ; indeed, its more galling in- 
stances of oppression seemed to have slipped unconsciously away. 
Some, like the eel-fishing, were changed for an easy rent, others 
like the slavery of the fullers and the toil of flax, simply disap- 
peared. By usage, by omission, by downright forgetfulness, here 
a little struggle, there by a present to a needy abbott, the town- 
won freedom. 5 

"Mad," as the land owners of England called him, John 
Ball was, in 1377, the first to preach natural equality. "By what 
right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we ?" "Why 
do they hold us in serfage?" The popular rhyme of his time 
asked : "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the 
gentleman?" 6 

In England the numbers of the unfree were swelled by death 
and crime. Famine drove men to bend the knee in the evil days 
for meat, the debtor flung on the ground the freeman's sword and 

"Green, ibid, p. 117. 
6 Tbid, p. 314- 



sociology. 549 

spear and took up the laborer's mattock and placed his head, as a 
slave, in his master's hands. Criminals became crime-serfs of 
plaintiff or king. Sometimes a father, pressed by need, sold chil- 
dren and wife into bondage. 7 There was a papal doctrine of the 
condemnation of Jews to perpetual bondage, in the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries. In Poland the peasant was always the 
hereditary property of the lord of the manor, as claimed by the 
nobles, but this is denied by the common people. 

Villeinage serfdom from the seventh to the eleventh centuries 
was the bondage in which were held those who cultivated the soil. 

Rome, Italy and the church patronized slavery down to the 
sixteenth century. The popes issued edicts of slavery against 
whole towns and provinces. Boniface VIII, in 1294 to 1348; 
Clement V, against Venice ; Sixtus IV against the Florentines ; 
also Gregory XI against the same people, 1375-1378; Julius II 
against Bologne and Venice. Whoever captured inhabitants of 
such places had holy permission to make slaves of them. Rome 
was the last of Europe to retain slavery. The theological claim 
was made that original sin deprived man of any right to freedom. 
By 1450, in the seventy years which had intervened since the last 
peasant uprising, villeinage had died naturally away before the 
progress of social changes. 8 

The Barbary States relinquished Moslem slavery of Christians 
in A. D. 1816. The peasants were freed in Hungary and Aus- 
tria in 1849. Russian erriancipation of serfs occurred by order of 
Alexander II in 1861, whereby twenty-two million serfs and twen- 
ty-six million more peasants who were practically serfs, were "lib- 
erated." But their condition is as bad as before. 

There is no slavery among the Afghans and some other be- 
nighted Asiatics. The institution of slavery appears to have 
been a step toward civilization, for instead of slaughter of pris- 
oners they were enslaved. 

In 1 38 1 what was known as the Wat Tyler rebellion occurred 
in England, precipitated by a tax gatherer's insult to Tyler's 
young daughter, though the real cause back of it was the practical 

7 Ibid, p. 19. 

8 Ibid, p. 353- 



55° THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

serfdom of the people. With 30,000 men he forced from Richard 
I, the boy king, letters of emancipation, and the king pretended to 
favor all their demands. Later, with his army of 40,000, Richard 
revoked his grant of freedom and said : "In bondage you shall 
abide, and that not your old bondage, but a worse !" Seven 
thousand men perished on the gallows, parliament trimmed to any 
breeze, but the land owners refused consent to free their slaves. 
So no sooner does William "abolish'' slavery than it crops up 
again later. This has been the world's experience, usually a new 
name is given it just as tyranny, when overthrown, hides itself 
behind some new disguise. 

In 1382 Wyclif headed a movement for intellectual freedom 
at the same time W^at Tyler fought for bodily emancipation. The 
one against taxing the mind out of existence, and the other the 
body out of sustenance. 9 

A. D. 1395 Richard II till 24 years old was enslaved by his 
guardian uncle, when he asserted himself. So no human being 
is less than another liable to slavery in some form or other, mental 
or physical, peasant or king. 

The pride and cunning of the pope in enslaving the English 
people was the theme of Wyclif and the "Lollards" in the time of 
Henry IV up to A. D. 141 3. 

In all this "Christian era" persecution of the Jews went on> 
especially between the time of Edward to that of Cromwell. 

The bastile of Paris was originated to protect against English 
foes in 1356; it was enlarged by Charles Y, and after his death 
made a prison. Charles YI enlarged it still more, and it was 
finally destroyed by the enraged people June 14, 1789. The peo- 
ple were inhumanly treated by royalty in this prison. 

Soldiers committed suicide under Frederick "the great" to 
escape the severity of his service. 

Queen Catherine of Russia put a guard over a flower in her 
field, and then forgot both flower and sentinel. Until the time 
of Nicholas III guards had been placed in the same spot, and all 
had' forgotten why he was stationed there. 

Pushkin, the Russian poet, wrote : "A horrible thought fills 
mv soul with gloom ; here in the midst of flourishing fields and 

9 Ibid, p. 302. 



SOCIOLOGY. 



55 l 



hills, the lover of humanity sorrowtully notes everywhere the per- 
nicious signs of shameful ignorance. Blind to tears and deaf to 
moans, a scourge of men decreed by fate, a ruling class, unfeeling, 
lawless, wild, appropriates with ruthless rod the husbandman's 
labor, property and time.'' 

As the Chinaman was forced to adopt the pigtail by his Tartar 
conquerors as an indication of inferiority, and he now considers it 
a distinction, so women, handicapped with dresses, cling to their 
ancient attire as slaves sometimes fought to perpetuate their own 
slavery and as some Mormon women laud polygamy. 

Darwin 10 dwells upon the enslavement of women being uni- 
versal and dating from remote periods, and even today fathers 
sell their daughters in Circassia to Moslem procurers, who resell 
them to rich men. 

A race will not advance if one-half is held in slavery as women 
are by men to a gross extent in such places as Turkey, where the 
Sultan Abdul Hamid, the oppressor, is the son of an Armenian 
woman, a race that has been terribly oppressed. What can the 
union of a tyrant and a slave result in but an Abdul Hamid, the 
fox. the wolf, the coward jackal, who trembles at the idea of his 
subjects having education or liberty. So Rome has opposed in- 
struction to children as unfitting them to be controlled in their 
minds and bodies. The revenues of that gigantic political or- 
ganization, the Catholic church, came from devotion and super- 
stition imposed upon by a luxuriating priesthood among a people 
too blind to see for themselves. 

The greatest freedom should be permitted to women and nat- 
ural selection will determine what station they are fitted for. No 
theorist has ever predicted it. 

Woman suffrage dates from 1790-1849; since Mary Wall- 
land takes high rank in prosperity on account of it. France lacks 
advance owing to its subordinating women. When they can leg- 
islate France will surprise herself by the consequences. 

Woman suffrage dates from 1790- 1849, since Mary Wall- 

stonecraft published her "Vindication of the Rights of Women" 

in London, in 1790. the movement has gradually grown. In 

1840 a World's Anti-Slavery Convention was held, and woman's 

10 Descent of Man. p. 350. 



55 2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

enfranchisement was taken up. The meetings were sometimes 
mobbed and insulted, and also denounced by the pulpit. The 
movement was split in two by rejection of women delegates. The 
following date certain advances : 

1842, Women in the medical profession. 

1865, Higher education of women in England. 

1869, Progress in Europe and America. 

The world over, in Damascus and London, New York and St. 
Petersburg, women are paid about one-half what men receive 
for the same service ; because advantage is taken of their being 
weak physically, and unable to assert their rights. 

Louis XIV schemed to strengthen the position of the royal 
bastards by imposing a tax on marriage licenses so exorbitant 
that the matrimonially inclined preferred living in what was wed- 
lock to their consciences, but concubinage in law. The extor- 
tion went to coffers by which the extravagances of the Dues and 
mademoiselles were supplied. 

Sweat shops are many, where starving men, women and chil- 
dren toil, upon eye-straining work, such as sewing and making 
cigars, underpaid, sick, abused and even robbed of their scanty 
earnings by men who are "respected members of churches and 
society." 

Homes are multitudinous where servants are deprived of de- 
cent comforts, roomed in foul, damp basements, with no time 
from their work to clean their own sleeping places. Practically 
many housewives thus unintentionally, but nevertheless effectual- 
ly, murder their servants, legally and without compunctions. 
"Doctor, if that girl is sick, please send her at once to a charity 
hospital ; she cannot stay here/' is an often heard request from a 
palatial domicile, concerning some over-worked servant. 

Among dangerous handicrafts it has been estimated that the 
feather workers for women's hats inhale fine feathers and are 
occasionally suffocated by them, that 70 per cent of needle polish- 
ers, 80 of flint workers, 40 of grindstone makers, and 36 per 
cent- of stone cutters end consumptive. Glass workers, diamond 
cutters, millers, phosphorus and lead workers suffer also in vari- 
ous ways. 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the factories tend- 



sociology. 553 

ed to prolong the working day, but legislation began in the 
nineteenth century against it. The usual trick was to knock out 
the noon rest and then by candle light child and female labor was 
brought in. 

Voltaire held that a government would be worthy of Hotten- 
tots in which it permitted to a certain number of men to say : 
"Let those pay taxes who work; we ought not to pay anything 
because we are idle." 

It is difficult for all and impossible for some to be convinced 
of our common animal existence. "Fine feathers make fine 
birds." Strip some of them and what puny, helpless things they 
are. Similarly with the wealthy, their glitter, finery and power 
seem to cast them in a* better mould than the ordinary. A physi- 
cian who is familiar with practice among one class of people is 
often puzzled upon encountering another class as though diseases 
differed between the rich and poor. Ex-President Benjamin 
Harrison in a will contest in Richmond, Indiana, asked me on 
the witness stand if the Chicago asylum was not for the pauper 
insane, to intimate that knowledge secured among that class could 
not avail with the wealthy insane. The inability of classes to 
feel for each other comes of their separation. The miserable 
sufferings of a pauper dying neglected in a poor house awaken 
pity only among higher developed persons. Those who can feel 
sorrow only for tales of pain among wealthy dying amid luxu- 
rious surroundings have not evolved to their best capabilities. 

In 1903 there were 19,000 slave children estimated in Chicago 
working 15 to 18 hours a day, and often the parents were to 
blame. When the Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, miners were asked 
by the arbitration committee how much they were paid per ton 
they said they did not know, as the settling was made too com- 
plicated for them to understand and they took whatever was 
given them, which enabled a bare existence. Child slavery is 
said to be taking the place of former negro slavery in the cotton 
factories of the south, often controlled by northern capital. 

Prof. J. T. Hatfield, of Evanston, Illinois, served on the 
cruiser Yale in the Spanish-American war and reported a dis- 



554 TIIE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

position to aristocracy on the part of officers in resenting any re- 
spectability among the sailors. 

The Syrians are in pitiable ignorance and poverty, the Sultan 
of Turkey allows only incorrect maps, as he does not wish his 
people to be informed, and the Moslem priests discourage learn- 
ing. The forms of slavery are innumerable : the spendthrift is 
apt to become the slave of creditors, alcohol places the victim in 
the power of others. Patent medicines enslave dupes and rob 
them of money and health. Newspapers print lying advertise- 
ments and refuse to expose frauds, as they share the profits of 
such deceit. The English opium trade with China grew to a 
million pounds sterling per year and in 1842 England forced 
China by war to resume the trade. 

As a result of the stealing of the brain work of others such 
men as Elisha Gray have been kept in poverty by their enslavers. 
At the age of 63 he remained poor while others had made millions 
from his inventions. There died in a southern city, recently, the 
inventor of the typesetting machine, which is now in use in nearly 
all newspaper offices. Among the things he left was a pamphlet 
bitterly complaining about the treatment he had received in re- 
gard to his invention and expressly in reference to the charge 
that there was a disposition to drop his name from the machinery 
and thus to rob him of his reputation as an inventor. 11 

Goodyear was starving through the greed of capitalists w T ho 
tried to steal his vulcanizing process. 

Conspiracy is a natural means of combining to accomplish an 
end and is part of the organizing propensity of man and animals. 
Politicians and some tradesmen are greatly inclined to make com- 
binations often of a far-reaching and harmful nature. In the 
average political insane asylum may be seen the employes plotting 
together to either keep their places, to secure promotion, to de- 
grade some in their way, or to get a chance at plunder which their 
superiors often seek to absorb for themselves alone. Trustees 
will plot to get a medical superintendent out of the way if he 
is too honest to join them in their pilfering, and even the gov- 

11 Philadelphia Sat. Ev. Post, Feb. 16, 1901. 



sociology. 555 

ernor oi a state has dismissed too honest persons and replaced 
them by thieves who would "work with the part)-." 

This state of thing's is not constant nor universal, but at all 
times and in all places the well-disposed and efficient are plotted 
against by those who devote their energies and time to selfish 
ends. Every institution contains such conspirators and they 
should be sought for and suppressed promptly before legitimate 
work can be safely clone. 

Conspiracy is the easiest and commonest performance of men. 
Rascals float together, as Schopenhauer says, and know one an- 
other at a glance. Joan of Arc's record of her Poictier trial 
disappeared conveniently for her later judges, and it could not 
be used at her rehabilitation. Her appeal to the pope was hushed 
up when it was seen that she did not know how important it was 
for her. 

Gen. Miles was threatened with court-martial and dismissal 
for calling attention to rotten meat issued to the army. 

Cervera was sent to destruction by boodlers in Spain who, 
fearing exposure of their steals, refused him a seat in the cortes, 
as he was under charges for the loss of his fleet. They did all 
they could to make loss of the fleet possible before he started and 
tried to kill him to keep the truth from appearing. 

Good men cannot combine as do rascals, for it is to serve 
some conspiracy of profit that draws knaves together. I noticed 
that when the Dunning asylum exposure was opposed by politi- 
cians it drew into the opposition quack doctors, ecclesiastical 
hypocrites, gamblers, saloonkeepers and the vile of all ranks and 
degrees. 

The Highbinders is a secret society among the Chinese which 
was originally started to protect their members, but, as so often 
happens in societies, the purposes were completely subverted and 
murder and blackmail became the sole object. Oaths binding 
the members are taken secretly and are given only by the mouth 
to the ear. A patriotic society ostensibly to free Ireland became 
controlled by a clique and a few managers were enriched and 
even went to the extreme of murdering any one who attempted, 
exposure. In Turkey the Sultan is kept in ignorance of real 
conditions. His grand vizier, Said Pasha, was remarkably honest 



556 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

and was plotted against incessantly by dishonest courtiers who 
nearly had him executed once. He is poor, of course. Hassan 
Pasha, the corrupt minister of marine, is worth sixty million dol- 
lars robbed from the navy department, the ships of which are 
falling to pieces, but the Sultan does not know it. There is a 
colony in Damascus of the victims of the Turkish Sultan's spy 
system, the majority of whom are doubtless honorable and faith- 
ful officers who were in the way of rascals who fatten upon in- 
trigue and theft. Siberia and Saghalien have received many 
thousands of innocent persons condemned for political reasons. 

Leonard Volk made a statue of Abraham Lincoln for the 
capital in Springfield, Illinois. It represents the emancipator 
standing with erect head and behind him is a Roman chair. St. 
Gaudans' statue in Lincoln Park, Chicago, copies this statue, but 
moves the figure away from contact with the chair, breaking 
thus the solidarity, and omits a cloak which Volk placed over the 
back of the chair and which disposed of otherwise hard lines, 
and Volk claims that Lincoln did not incline his head as in the 
park copy. Vinnie Ream's Lincoln in the Washington capitol and 
French's Liberty of the Columbus Exposition, a figure with a 
dress made like straight clap-boards on end holding aloft a 
pumpkin on which is perched a crow, are, with the Christopher 
Columbus of the Lake Front, which finally went into the scrap 
heap, typical of the sort of art "statesmen" authorize. 

Jason E. Hammond, superintendent of public instruction in 
Michigan 12 claimed that lobbying occurred in legislatures to 
induce official corruption of public school instruction in various 
ways mainly by taking away standard books and substituting 
foolish ones. A nation cannot be too jealous of interferences 
with its public school system. There are crafty ancient organi- 
zations like the Jesuits who seek in subtle ways to degrade all 
public and private instruction. Conspiracies to make man an 
ape again would be for "the greater glory of God," and inci- 
dentally fill the pockets of those interested in the wreckage of 
mankind. And it is to be remembered that not all these con- 
spirators are bad by any means ; much good work is done by the 

"Chicago Times-Herald, Aug. 15, 1898. 



SOCIOLOGY. 557 

charity dispensers of these orders by individuals who are sincere 
and true in heart, enabling their scheming superiors to point to 
them and exclaim, "See how good we are!" 

A percentage of the result of changing text books goes to 
publishers who may be the tools of worse schemers. 

Crowds are huddled together in New York tenement houses, 
preyed upon by liquor selling landlords, their families perishing 
of filth-diseases owing to negligence of local politicians. But 
these same crowds were ready to murder any one who sought to 
make things better, because they were owned body and soul by 
their political bosses. Even the post-office employes have been 
induced to intercept mail in the interests of politicians, particu- 
larly where there was danger of their steals* being discovered.. 
This tendency of the abjectly poor to oppose their real friends 
and patronize their destroyers is like the ignorant rich succumb- 
ing to quacks who flatter them, not appreciating the fact that the 
one who spends his time in learning how to do the most good 
and be the most efficient surgeort or physician does not loaf about 
club rooms or attend pink teas, or otherwise conspire to ingratiate 
himself among the wealthy. 

The attempt to suppress Lord Nelson was paralleled by Samp- 
son's jealousy of Schley's destruction of the Cervera fleet. Nel- 
son disobeyed the signal of recall which he never heard. 13 Jervis, 
Lord St. Vincent, omitted Nelson's name from his despatch at the 
instigation of Sir Robert Calder, the captain of the fleet in the 
battle with the Spaniards in 1797, but after the battle had been won 
mainly by Nelson, his superior arrived to enjoy what Nelson called 
the parade of taking possession of beaten enemies, just as Samp- 
son did when Cervera was captured by Schley. It would be char- 
itable to regard the paretic dementia from which Sampson finally 
died, with its grand delusions, as responsible for much of Samp- 
son's behavior, but what justification has the navy department? 
Jervis wrote finally : "Commodore Nelson, who was in the rear 
on the starboard tack, took the lead on the larboard and contrib- 
uted very much to the fortune of the day." Completely ignoring 
the fact that Nelson had decided the day at Cape St. Vincent. 

"Horatio Nelson, W. C. Russell, p. 73; Mahan, Life of Nelson, Vol. 
I, p. 281. 



5^8 THE EVOLUTION OF MAX AND HIS MIND. 

Mahan (p. 151, op. cit.) speaks in his mild way of Lord Hood 
having inadequately mentioned Nelson's services in Corsica. 

Gulliver captured the navy of Blufuscu and the courtiers of 
Lilliputia conspired to have his eyes put out and to condemn him 
to starvation. Gen. Fitz John Porter, it is said, was made a 
scapegoat for Gen. Pope's reverses, and dismissed in disgrace, 
though acquitted years afterward, in spite of his enemies follow- 
ing him with bitter political hate. Cortez was conspired against 
in his army in Spain, in Cuba and when he went to Honduras. The 
treason trial and unjust condemnation of Admiral Hon. John 
Byng was referred to by Gen. Sebert in the Dreyfus trial, as an 
instance of an innocent man being executed. Byng" was born in 
1704, and executed in Gibraltar in 1757. The French said that 
Byng was shot as a traitor, but the English claim that he was 
acquitted of treason, but shot for incapacity, though thousands 
have escaped his charge even when guilty. Pitt tried to save 
him, as the government had merely given Byng rotten ships. It 
was the government that was incapable and sacrificed Byng as a 
scapegoat. It is an old political trick to divert any inquiry of this 
kind into personalities, and thus call away attention from the real 
subject. 

Sixtus IV, the reigning pope, ordered a conspiracy to kill the 
Medici of Florence. A soldier had too superstitious a reverence 
for the church to enable him to assassinate at the very altar, so 
two priests agreed to undertake the deed and Machiavelli 14 says 
that the partial failure was due to hardened, experienced murder- 
ers not having been employed. Guilliamo de Medici was stabbed 
to death, but his brother Lorenzo escaped and fought the priests 
till his assistants came to his aid. The Archbishop Salviati was 
hanged for the conspiracy by the mob, who favored de Medici. 
Pisistratus of Athens and the Medici of Florence were cruel 
tyrants, but beloved by the citizens. 

The attempt of Germany to intrigue with Spain by making a 
pretense of hostile display against the Americans at Manila is re* 
membered, the object being to enable Germany to purchase some 

14 Political Discourses, Bk. Ill, p. 6. 



sot. tOLOGY. 



559 



islands of Spain and at the same time avoid a war with the United 
States. 

Wilhelm menaced little Hayti and imposed an indemnity, for 
a police brawl affair, which he would not dare to mention to a 
stronger country. He helped the Chinese against Japan, the 
Turks against the Greeks, the Spaniards in the Philippines against 
the Americans, and the Boers against the English in South Africa, 
yet he collapses when openly assailed. He acts like a bullying 
school boy or an epileptic. 

Kriiger fought his own people, intrigued against President 
Burger and ousted him and marched on Bloemfontein to take the 
Orange Free State. He escaped from South Africa and left his 
wife, who died there, while enjoying his ease in Holland. Much 
of his career resembles the capering of a great baboon. 

All of Henry the First's schemes for his succession fell to 
pieces at his death, as the courtiers thought nothing of such little 
things as vows, perjury and breaking faith. 

Stephen got a servant to swear falsely that Henry I had named 
him as his heir, whereupon the archbishop of Canterbury crowned 
him, an instance of manufacturing evidence similar to what is 
secured in some murder trials by ambitious police and jailers 
who are anxious to get the credit of securing testimony, even 
though the prisoner may not be guilty. 

Oath breaking was easy enough for kings and courtiers. John 
and Henry III swore readily and seldom kept an oath or vow. 
The latter agreed to confirm the liberties of England if parlia- 
ment voted a large amount. As soon as Henry had the money 
he defied propriety again. 

Ireland was betrayed by King Donald to the English under 
Henry II, and Wallace was betrayed to the English by a Scotch 
attendant in Edward I's day. 

Under Henry YIII England made a blundering alliance with 
Spain, and was taken in by that country, which left England in 
the lurch and made its own terms with France. 

The gunpowder plotters against parliament tried to raise the 
Catholics against James, but were repulsed, probably because 
enlightenment was greater by that time. History serves some 
purpose in keeping people advised of the folly of the past. 



560 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Parasitism is living at the expense of another without destroy- 
ing it or doing it service. The tapeworm is not likely to outlive 
its host, hence it cannot advantage by destroying it. Domestica- 
tion borders on slavery, and the master may become parasitic 
upon the slave, as the red ants upon the black, becoming helpless 
without them. But there may be reciprocal association, as in mu- 
tualism. Certain parasitic plants, as the mistletoe, take from the 
host only the water and inorganic substances derived from the 
soil. Others, like the dodder, dispense with roots and leaves, 
and abstract the living matter of plants. Parasites do not need 
a high organization, and hence do not develop one. Mimetic 
parasitism is where an animal or plant imitates another to be able 
to approach victims, and is thus a hypocrite and demagogue.. 
Others mimic stronger species to be able to escape enemies. 

Sinecurists and beggars are parasites. Those who live on 
waste products are saprophytes of society, and those who steal 
are predatory. Mutualists render an equivalent for what they 
get. 

In Rome a community began as farmers and ended in being 
parasites, the populace being fed by the provinces and the rich 
depending upon slaves. Tenants who fail to pay rent are para- 
sitic on landlords, but others of that class turn robber and so keep 
even. 

Washington, D. C, is filled with human parasites, not only in 
civil but in military and naval circles. A senator made it a point 
to never believe the most plausible stories of these schemers. All 
of Washington society is honeycombed with jobbers who get soft 
places in service. Schley was a "sailor-man," one who preferred 
active duty to soft seats in Washington. Crowninshield and 
others intrigued with politician Long for easy places. Every 
place in life swarms with parasites who, like the "coffee-coolers" 
of Washington, appropriate the pay and honors intended for 
merit and impudently ask: "What are you going to do about 
it?" Some of these hunters for positions have been known to 
even prostitute their own wives in their search for soft places. 
The honest rank and file of workers are too busy attending to 
dutv to understand what menaces them. Intriguery turns out 



SOCIOLOGY. 561 

the efficient and puts In the inefficient one, who lias the adroitness 
to hang onto the job whether he otherwise fills the place or not. 

Goldsmith says there is a great deal of friendliness in the 
world for those who have become successful, but the rich are 
by parasites, false friends, charlatans and flatterers who 
turn them against those who have no designs upon them. Often 
these parasites adopt an armistice among themselves, and agree 
to attack new comers. Thus the wealthy never see life as it 
really is. unless they lose their means, and then they are bewil- 
dered, for their fictitious world has gone with their resources. 

The poor when rich forsake old friends and make new ones, 
who abandon them on their becoming poor again. The poor are 
subject to dangers from which the rich think they escape, but 
wealth attracts new sources of danger in intriguery for its pos- 
session. 

An instance of social parasitism was where a medical student 
was absent from home trying to earn enough to go through col- 
lege, but a minister ingratiated himself and relatives into the 
family of the student and literally ate him up, so that he had to 
work another year to make up for his being digested sacerdotally. 

Endeavors to rid a community of parasites are not always wise 
as weeds introduced from abroad as useful or ornamental have 
become harmful, as the chicory, wild onion and water hyacinth. 
Likewise, birds and other animals introduced to exterminate pests 
become in time by their increase or bad habits, worse than the 
original nuisance. The mongoose was brought from India to 
Jamaica to destroy rats, and after eating the rats it destroyed 
domestic and farm animals, fruits and vegetables. A gypsy 
moth ravaged Massachusetts trees, and the politicians made it the 
pretext of robbing the state funds, in some cases cultivating nests 
of moths for the bounty offered by the government. 

Half of England and Wales belongs to 4.500 persons, half of 
Ireland to 744, and half of Scotland to 70. 15 Six owned half of 
Africa in the Roman Empire. Even Trinity Church, Xew York, 
is parasitic, and owns brothels. Westminster Abbey and White 
Chapel funds own immense real estate properties, which they do 
not improve. In 1788 there were 1,221,000 parasitic priests, no- 
il Marx. 



562 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

bles, officials and soldiers upon 3,800,000 people in Spain. One 
person supported three. Politicians are parasitic upon the pub- 
lic. Systems may be parasitic and force otherwise better persons 
to minister to them. A building society may stop the parasitism 
of speculators in houses for working people. Co-operative so- 
cieties may dispense with the parasitic middle man, but the de- 
partment store develops to crush the small trader. Hope can be 
founded upon the fact that no one is born a social parasite, neces- 
sarily, but he acquires that character which is not transmitted. 
Society is enfeebled by. the parasite, and it, in turn, degenerates. 
Poor organization multiplies parasitism. 

Julian Gordon 16 says, "Entire families as well as individuals 
belong to the. group parasitic. They possess a mixture of servil- 
ity and audacity which diverts. These are the men and women 
who shine in reflected splendors. They drive other people's 
coaches, sail other people's yachts, get other people to pay for the 
parties they give, use their acquaintances as banks, as profitable 
investments. A lady who belonged to this class went to visit 
friends in New Hampshire. A few days after her arrival she 
gave birth to a baby. Her hosts took upon themselves all the 
expenses of the performance, stood sponsors for the child, and 
even settled something upon it. They said its mamma had made 
herself so agreeable. To be an accomplished parasite one must 
have peculiar aptitudes, a great deal of suppleness, plenty of 1111- 
scrupulousness, a tough hide. Xo born leader ever followed suc- 
cessfully. The rebellion of natural imperiousness, the revolt of 
pride, the anguish of wounded sensibility, have no place with 
these delightful w T heedlers. As we have said, they are perhaps, 
nay probably, attractive. They fill their niche. They are even 
necessary." 

It was a favorite idea of Pasteur's that it is in the power of 
men to cause all parasitic diseases to disappear from the world. 
He had destroyed the grape vine disease and chicken cholera and 
added greatly to our means of combating filth diseases, but the 
term parasite is quite broad logically, and from that stand- 
point man himself is a parasite on the earth's surface. Hebra be- 

16 Cosmopolitan, Dec. 1901. 



SOCIOLOGY. 563 

lieved that many of the afflictions of the Israelites mentioned in 
the old testament were nothing more than the itch, which is a 
small living parasite, the proper name for which is Sarcoptes 
scabiei, which Hahnemann, the originator of homoeopathy, taught 
was the cause of all diseases, so that a millionth of a grain of an 
itch mite, on the similia similibus theory, would cure all diseases. 
Yet some think we are not related to monkeys in intelligence. 
Tape worms, trichina, etc., infest men, hogs and other omnivor- 
ous animals, sometimes developing partly in one animal and finally 
in another, by stages. 

Thread worms pass through beetles and develop later in pigs, 
some are in shrimps and then in fish, others begin in beetles and 
find their way through hamsters and voles, and some in water 
shrimp and then in ducks. The sexes of thread worms are gener- 
ally distinct. Vinegar eels are thread worms living in fungi in 
paste or vinegar, but owing to chemicals other than wine or beer 
being used in making vinegar, these eels are seen less now. 
There is a wheat eel and a turnip eel. 

Man plants and animals are parasitic on the earth and every- 
thing depends upon something else. The monkey is a tree para- 
site, the tree on the soil, the vine on the tree, and all are parasitic 
upon the earth. 

What protects one from certain classes of predatory or para- 
sitic organisms invites the assaults of others. The student who 
avoids social entanglements, for instance, escapes much trouble, 
but makes new ones for himself. His obscurity may be taken ad- 
vantage of to steal his work and revile him if he dare to protest. 
To oppress him by taking advantage of his carelessness and lack 
of social intriguery. 

Parasites desert the bankrupt as rats do a drowning ship. 
Shakespeare notes that "The great man down, you mark his fa- 
vorite flies. The poor advanced makes friends of enemies," 
meaning that the parasite drops, away when its nourishment is 
threatened, and even previously hostile sycophants become friend- 
ly with the recently fortunate. 

Priests may be mutualists, predatory or parasitic, individually, 
but the entire clerical system in this age is parasite upon the com- 



564 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

munity, for it lives upon the superstition and hopes of the people, 
and gives vague promises in return. Individual cases may change 
this, as when a cleric renders valuable services to an ignorant 
community and it rewards him basely. 

The living together or mutual interdependence of animals is 
designated symbiosis, that between the wolf and badger has been 
described . 1T Mutualists have been mistaken for parasities some- 
times, as the lice on fowls which clean up epithelial areas. 

The crocodile bird visits his host to pick his teeth and tongue 
free from leeches. Buphugas, the surgeon bird, opens cysts on 
buffalo and removes the larvae ; the European starling picks the 
backs of cattle. Feathers and scales are sometimes kept bright bv 
so-called parasites on birds and fish. Jas. Weir, Jr., describes an 
organism that eats decayed and unimpregnated crayfish eggs, so a 
parasitic mutualist is thus possible. 

The elands are accompanied by rhinoceros birds, which watch 
over them and give them the alarm when an enemy is near. 

The hawfinch destroys noxious insects, but also steals peas 
from the kitchen garden. So in many cases the relations of ani- 
mals with each other may be harmful, beneficial and sometimes a 
mixture of both. 

The coachman fly which destroys the horse fly is said to be 
welcomed by the horse, and may sit on any part of him, while the 
horse fly makes him nervous and restive. 

The cuckoo is a notorious parasite upon other birds, laying 
his eggs among strangers and leaving them to be hatched by 
them, and the young cuckoos ungratefully may cast out the eggs 
of their foster parents. 

Hermit crabs in occupying cast-off shells of mollusks are to a 
certain degree parasitic, at least upon abandoned domiciles. 

Hvenas were dependent upon lions for their food, but their in- 
crease near the haunts of men show that hyenas regard man as a 
better destroyer and purveyor than the lion. 

Pilot fish swim in front of sharks and accompany vessels for 
the feeding obtained. 

The honey guide is a bird that leads man to the hives of honey 

17 American Naturalist, June, 1884, p. 644. 



SOCIOLOGY. 565 

bees in forests. It merely socks the grubs or the young bees. 
The Langur monkeys chase tigers and point to them and 

scream at them to aid the hunter to find them, and they recognize 
men as allies and friends. 

Society among men is founded upon mutualism with a very 
large history of parasitic "nobility" and priesthood. "Trade 
never was considered a degradation in Catalonia, as it was in Cas- 
tile." says Prescott, 18 hence the Catalonians are a finer, manlier 
race than the majority of the ignorant priest-ridden Spanish. 

A phase of mutualism is the potency of propinquity, being near 
to help or influence. The vulgar idea in destiny controlling mar- 
riages, etc., is met by showing that nearness in everything. "The 
absent is always in the wrong" is one old saw, while Saadi, the 
Persian poet, sings, "Nearest to the king is dearest, be thy station 
high or low." The adjacent furnish husbands and wives, and it 
is the nearest that afford friends. Often next door neighbors find 
much congeniality and become lifelong friends, where had it not 
been for this adjacency they could not have known each other. 

Whether to beg, to work, to steal, there must be adjacency. 
The ivy clings to the nearest wall and the other parasites depend 
upon the nearest support, things trite enough, only there is such 
prevalent superstition about people being thrown together pur- 
posely instead of by accident. 

Distance and time dim affection between relatives and friends, 
and it is seldom realized that absence is liable to undo the work 
of years of intimacy. 

Darwin's statement of female dogs often throwing themselves 
away on curs of low degree is similar to the fact that girls run off 
with their fathers' coachmen and teachers may marry Chinamen, 
through the same propinquity and familiarity that causes dogs to 
select mates outside of their station in life. 

By recollecting that "no man or measure can be wholly right 
or wholly wrong," as Spencer says, and further that good and 
evil, as generally understood, both combined and separately 
evolve, organize and in time give way to new methods, combina- 
tions and workings, there will be less confusion in endeavors to 
lessen the friction of civilized living. 
18 History of Fertlinand and Isabella. 



566 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

No new plan for the improvement of business or of those em- 
ployed can be free from inconvenience or even downright suffer- 
ing to others. A child cannot be born without blood loss, nor an 
organization without tearing away from previous established con- 
ditions. Often the newly instituted affair will prove of great 
general benefit while damaging a few who are deprived of former 
methods of earning. But with all this the intent of the organiza- 
tion may have been rapacious and cruel in the extreme, and coun- 
ter efforts may also be unlawful and injurious to others until a 
compromise is effected and adjustment secured on the new basis 
of working. 

Trusts are inevitable, and resemble the tendency of nature in 
the evolution of the nervous system for the higher or more com- 
plex centres to usurp the functions of the lower, and also to estab- 
lish better correlations of all parts of the organism. It is a selfish 
method and part of the grab game of the universe, but it eventu- 
ates in usefulness to the aggregation and incidentally to the indi- 
vidual. 

Until recently but little thought has been given to those "vital 
processes of spontaneous co-operation" by which national life, 
growth and progress have been carried on ; all thoughts beings 
turned to the actions of rulers. 

The differences between such a colony as that of the polyp- 
corals and separate individuals are merely those of the quantity 
of units clinging together or separating, but when we analyze the 
individual we find him made up of parts that are combined to 
work together, so that after all the colony is an individual, and 
the individual is a colony, the only difference is in the stopping 
place of further combinations. A community cannot cohere, 
much less advance, unless it combines, and history proves that 
the most practical combinations are those founded upon utter 
selfishness, for it is an animus readily understood by all man- 
kind, and derived from the ingrained nature of all men and all 
animals, with the advantage that if any change is likely it will be 
for the better, whereas institutions founded upon generosity are 
more than liable to tumble into degeneracy by corruptions of the 
selfish exploiters. 

In 1901 a vaudeville trust formed on a bad basis, which gave 



SOCIOLOGY. 567 

the power to select actors into the hands of one man, who proved 
to be grossly incompetent and malicious, resulting in lowering the 
standard of talent on the stage, but the uproar that followed 
overturned this bad condition of things, and both actors and man- 
agers profitted by the changes evolved. 

The unsophisticated think that people are combined in business 
for ideal purposes, whereas some real interest associates them. 
It is natural to think that charitable institutions are ideal, founded 
and conducted by generosity and mercy. The founder usually 
wants to perpetuate his name, or his motives may be superstitious 
ones, and the place is most often run by a scrambling, traducing, 
selfish horde of wire pullers, schemers and grabbers, intent upon 
money, position, power or influence. Life in a hospital will dis- 
close the natures of those highest in control to be most often re- 
voltingly selfish and hypocritical, while among the underlings will 
be found very excellent men and motives, but such are least fitted 
to survive in an atmosphere of combinations, liars and haters of 
superiority. 

Combinations tend to increase the wages of labor if labor is 
alive to its own interests, while cheapening the cost of necessities 
as well as luxuries to the consumer. Roswell P. Flower holds 
that "if the Standard Oil Company tried to make ]/ 2 or T /\ cent 
a gallon there would be competitors in the field. It is satisfied 
with y% cent, so it controls the market and sells all over the 
world." But the company compromises between raising prices 
too high and missing its opportunities, by rapid raises far over the 
limit set by Flower, but following with a drop that would discour- 
age competition. The sole motive of a big organization, such as 
that, is to get everything it can, and the sole deterrent, its only 
conscience, is the fear that its future grasp might be shaken were 
it to raise prices too high. It need not be for an instant thought 
that there is any intention to benefit the people on the part of the 
organization ; that is purely incidental and often undesirable. Most 
combinations in nature are of that kind. The only reason the 
stomach lets the intestines have anything is because it cannot di- 
gest all, and the intestines reluctantly yield to the circulation what 
it cannot use up for itself, but the result is that all organs are nour- 



568 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ished by the blood thus selfishly made, just as well as though the 
process had been a voluntary one. 

Organization may be in co-operation for distribution or for 
consumption, for production, for banking or saving, and if those 
who contemplate these sorts of combinations will study the past 
they can derive valuable hints for proceeding. Usually the selfish 
methods need little study, but when philanthropy makes an en- 
deavor it seldom goes to the records of past attempts but ventures 
boldly upon a sea that numbers more wrecks than safe voyages. 

Tammany has a wonderfully strong and efficient organization 
based on pure selfishness, as utter as though the members were 
bandits, and in reality they are, with reference to the community it 
preys upon. Were it possible to make so powerful a corporation 
to benefit, instead of to rob, communities, as much good might 
result as Tammany does harm. But fancy blackmail being used 
to accomplish good ends. Any sort of society, no matter what its 
aims, is more than likely to fall into the hands of fools or rascals, 
and its original objects be completely forgotten, ignored, or re- 
versed. Spencer notes the tendency of societies to eventually sub- 
vert the very objects for which they were founded. 

The usual secre-t society varies in its effects upon the com- 
munity for good or harm. Indeed, the same order may have 
branches of opposite natures. Some lodges run to parade and 
hysteria. One spends a large sum on funerals and gives nothing 
to the widows ; others educate the orphans, and still other socie- 
ties like the crusading Templars of England and the Janissaries 
of Turkey merit the destruction that overtook than. 

State employment bureaus facilitate the securing of places, 
hut of course as these favor the unorganized who have no influ- 
ence with legislators, and as the average employment agency will 
fall into disuse and lose its fees, usually made at the cost of wrong 
and suffering by charging in advance for places which are not 
secured, there is passivity of law making in this line, with active 
opposition of the selfish employment agent and apathy on the part 
of the citizen. 

Among many needs for better organization of medical men 
appears the corrupt legislation secured by quacks, who buy up 
legislators to enable them to rob and murder the people unin- 



SOCIOLOGY . 569 

formed in medical matters. Physicians should also recognize the 
fact that surgeons are poor prescribers and poor diagnosticians, 

outside of eases requiring surger} . and often this latter is resorted 
to improperly because occasionally the surgeon has made a mis- 
take in diagnosis. Surgeons concentrate their attention upon 
their special field and cannot find time to develop in medical lines, 
any department of which is a life study. More soldiers during 
war die of disease than are killed by wounds, yet surgeons are 
selected rather than physicians, when both branches of medicine 
should be employed. The following figures show the relative 
numbers killed and those who died by disease during wars : 

Crimea, 4,602 killed, 17,600 died from disease, English side. 

Civil war, 93,969 killed, 186,216 died from disease, on Union 
side. 

Spanish war, 454 killed, 5,277 died from disease, American 
side. 

African, 3,000 killed, 6,000 died from disease, English side. 

Approximately, from the best accessible statistics, which if 
faulty numerically are not liable to be in regard to the relative 
proportions of deaths by wounds and disease. 

Gigantic combinations are being daily arranged in the United 
States and the pronounced expression of the voters in Chicago and 
elsewhere for municipal ownership shows that a sociological gov- 
ernment is dawning, for trusts will pass finally and naturally into 
the government control, and as the initiative and referendum is 
also demanded, the present liability to corrupt administration will 
be greatly lessened and civil service administration, when jealously 
looked after by the people to keep it out of the hands of profes- 
sional politicians, will make the coming government much better. 

The government may thus make a syndicate of trusts, but pre- 
vious to this there may be formed groups of such combinations, 
a developed aggregation of them for trade purposes. A bro- 
kerage of trust stock, such as sugar, coffee, matches, railway, etc., 
may finally pool, so as to afford a certain and safe income J;o the 
investor in the heterogeneous thus made homogeneous. One 
stock may be at 200, another at 98 and so on. The brokers who 
combine to prevent loss to investors, taking their profits currently, 
may be supplanted by government, and the result will be even 



57© THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

better than what exists in New Zealand, where some very good 
legislation enables prevention of sharky methods, saving the poor 
from being imposed upon, hence none becomes very rich or very 
poor. 

But an unenlightened people cannot be protected against the 
results of ignorance, for the inevitable scoundrel will find some 
way to enslave them, and there is necessity to exert self-control, 
such as France seldom displayed when her government grew 
weak. As Spencer says : "If the sentiment of subordination be- 
comes enfeebled without self-control gaining in strength propor- 
tionately there arises a danger of social dissolution." 

Some of the progress secured through division of labor may be 
recognized when a person has developed in one line of work and 
is suddenly forced into another line, even though unpleasant for 
him, the world receives the benefit of the change, as it brings to a 
new field methods from the old one, which otherwise would not 
have been secured ; so as in the case of a machinist turning car- 
penter or a chemist becoming a farmer, new ideas and processes 
start the world off on a more developed plane. The heteroge- 
neous becomes integrated anew. 

Organization is inevitable for among a passive people some 
are brazen enough to lead, the rest follow the clamor rather than 
reason, often against reason. 

Vigilance may ensure liberty. The French provinces that rose 
against the salt tax were let alone ; friends who visit patients in the 
worst political insane asylums or hospitals protect them from 
abuse. Systems that guard money are more likely to prevent 
theft than trusting to general honesty. Clients who handle their 
own money instead of letting lawyers do it, and authors who pub- 
lish their own books, are more likely to secure what may be due 
them. Municipalities organized against subsidy grabbers are apt 
to escape looting. 

A set of miscreants may be organized and succeed in robbing 
the people in their particular way, but through jealousy or to call 
away attention from their own operations, they are pointing to 
other methods of wrong doing, just as a sensational newspaper 
advertises quacks and patent medicines, but editorially adopts a 
high moral tone. Go to a newspaper proprietor and ask him to 



SOCIOLOGY. 571 

refuse a murderous, debauching quack medicine advertisement, 
ami he will gaze at you astonished at your impudence or fool re- 
form notions. Another newspaper proprietor every particle as 
cruel and selfish may denounce the nostrum as dangerous, if he 
knows enough, if he cannot blackmail the quack into giving him 
an advertisement. So intelligence may, in the absence of moral- 
ity, here and there lift the condition of the common people. 

In the thirteenth century trade, merchant and craft guilds in 
England instituted terrible class oppression and robbery of the 
poor. The continent also had its fierce struggle of this kind. 
The crafty few enslaving the simple many. In Koln the crafts- 
men had been reduced to almost serfage. This tyranny of class 
over class brought a century of bloodshed to Germany. 

In 1902 the city of Chicago gave police protection to the meat 
trust against the striking teamsters; the trust raised the price of 
meat and practically lowered the teamsters' wages, whereupon the 
Chicago Federation of Labor accused the packers of conspiracy 
to rob the community, claiming that for many years the meat 
packers had tapped the public mains and stolen the city water, 
evading equitable assessments of the property by bribing officials, 
furnishing rotten meat to the soldiers in our late war with Spain. 

Many animals, as in some instances the crows, have organizing 
power, drilling their young and making pilgrimages together, 
though such things are common to other species as well. Mau- 
rice Maeterlinck 19 tells of the bee community regulating the num- 
ber of births, controlling the policy of the queen, and preventing 
her from murdering her own offspring, but in times of hunger the 
workers may slay the whole imperial brood. Division of labor is 
extreme among the bees. Unlike the Aryans, who drove out their 
young to find new homes, the old bees sometimes leave the hive 
to the coming generation and fly to new fields of labor. The lazy 
drones are tolerated as the only males, but when too numerous 
are conscientiously slain by the neuter workers. So sex becomes 
specialized against work. The breeding business exempts the 
breeders from other labor. Ants are somewhat similarly organ- 
ized into workers, soldiers, breeders and slaves, with domesticated 
aphides or plant lice for cows. 

19 The Life of the Bee. 



57 2 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 



The extreme differentiation of labor would not be so harmful 
by cramping the faculties upon some special narrow line, were 
the laborer permitted to profit by his work to an extent enabling 
him to do more work in less time at better pay, with shorter hours, 
enabling him to develop himself intellectually. 

Nature menders would do well to look on and observe how 
sociology evolves; step by step the unrest of the unemployed 
fights the greed of the employers. Step by step the defalcation of 
untrustworthy employes are met by repressive detective insurance 
organizations, and gradually thief-catchers rob the thieves so 
much that the latter turn honest in self-defense. They realize 
that in their particular cases honesty is the best policy. 

Formerly 6 in the morning to 6 at night was the wage-earner's 
time, and is yet for many ; now 8 to 5 includes the hours for some 
craftsmen, an improvement brought about by strikes and compro- 
mises, often where for awhile one or the other side would be un- 
just or too exacting, and sometimes both sides were wrong, until 
time adjusted matters, whether the result were good for both 
sides or not. But there are millions unreached by the change, be- 
cause the fight was not for them. 

Industrial disturbances were widespread in 1895 to 1897, and 
there were bread riots in South Italy in 1898, but multitudes of 
such things, as Green notes, 20 as the fights of the guilds for su- 
premacy in Italy and England, practically trusts, with labor up- 
risings, date from the earliest times. 

An agrarian law of the Romans was popularly misunder- 
stood as making all land common property. The public lands 
only were distributed by agrarian law, and these were originally 
conquered lands. 21 But much of this suggested holding all land 
in common is a proposed reversion to far-off savage methods 
impossible at this stage to adopt. 

The agrarian league in Germany wants the state to buy and 
sell the foreign grain and to fix the selling price. 

The platform of the socialist labor party accused wealth of 
enslaving women and children. 22 This arraignment might just 

20 History of English People, p. 248. 

21 H. G. Lidell, History of Rome, Bk. II, Ch. VIII. 
23 Larned's History, Vol. VI, pp. 6 and 9. 



SOCIOLOGY, 



573 



as well have been carried back to our ancestry. It is from them 
we have inherited the disposition to enslave when we can. The 
poor is the slave because wealth is the more powerful ; nor is suf- 
ficient consideration accorded the fact that slave and enslaver 
would change places very readily if their opportunities were re- 
versed. Generally the poor man grown rich becomes a readv 
worker of slaves, and the rich man grown poor is as easily im- 
posed upon ; therefore, the trouble is not between capital and 
labor so much as it is inherent in the animal human nature. 

The blacklisting by railways of all employes of the American 
Railway Union, or who quit work during the big strike of 1894, 
resulted in the refusal of employment for them by all roads. 

Good men may honestly sustain bad systems, and bad men 
may be in good systems. It is the system that is usually perni- 
cious, though even the best is capable of perversion. An honest 
priest may do good to his flock while his church seeks only politi- 
cal success and wealth. The insurgent order of junior mechanics 
claims that the old order, which aimed to protect public schools 
from plotting Jesuits, was perverted by money making schemers. 

Both sides in organizing contests are often grasping, and the 
well meaning are made to suffer for the malevolence of the few 
rascals. Sometimes a striker may maliciously, destroy his em- 
ployer's property — a foolish thing to do from any point of view. 
Then a coal trust has been accused of blowing up its own prop- 
erty to turn the tide of popular sympathy against strikers it ac- 
cused of felony. 

Some employers find that the best way to defeat a union is to 
pay better wages and give shorter hours than are demanded by 
the union. This is not always possible, and by remembering the 
beautiful sameness of human nature, whether exhibited by trusts, 
unions, rich or poor, capitalists or laborer, the good or bad in 
each may be looked for, rather than expecting the right or wrong 
to be all on one side. 

A very long step toward satisfactory settlements of labor and 
capital disputes was made in Xew Zealand in 1894, in making 
arbitration compulsory. It is reported that the very best condi- 
tions for both sides have sprung from the method in practice. 



574 T1IE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

The selfishness of both parties now finds remunerative exercise in 
upholding the law and jealously preventing any attempts to vio- 
late it. 

With economy of production the wages of labor should ad- 
vance, but of course organized selfishness will pay as low wages 
as possible, and until compelled to do so in some way. The em- 
ployed can profitably combine to secure just pay, but attempting 
to dictate who shall be employed does not always secure the best 
results to themselves or employers. England is suffering from 
labor organizations being constructed on unwise lines, but it is 
natural to meet hoggish control with hoggish opposition. 

The cost of articles is the first to rise and wages are the last 
to rise because the employers are quite willing to accept the bet- 
ter price from the public, but they are not willing to part with 
any of this good fortune to those who help them to it, their labor- 
ers. Some notable exceptions occur, but it is not the rule to 
promptly raise wages as increase in receipts would justify. 

The coal miners' strike in Pennsylvania in September, 1900, 
was due to the owners paying small rates per ton and counting 
3,000 pounds to the ton and charging high prices for powder to 
the workmen, $2.75 a keg, when it could be had for $1.10. In- 
temperate workmen also want the stores abolished, so they can 
get pay instead of store orders. Intemperance is sometimes 
caused by the hopeless condition in which workmen may be held, 
as the sole ambition of the Russian moujik is to remain constantly 
drunk. 

As an instance of the tyranny of some workingmen's combina- 
tions, it is worth mentioning that four men were discharged from 
a cash register factory in Dayton, Ohio, which was arranged on 
the most approved sociological lines of profit sharing and comfort 
for employes, whereupon all the workmen struck. The workers' 
happiness and welfare were the main ideas of the establishment, 
but they denied their benefactors the right to discharge those they 
had once employed. But this is met with general denials. 

Thus most unexpected failures of social communities con- 
stantly occur through selfish old human nature cropping up in 
unanticipated ways. 



SOCIOLOGY 575 

People earning meagre livings are apt to be indifferent to com- 
binations in their own interests until forced into them by fear of 
extermination. The Netherlander did not efficiently combine 
against Philip II of Spain till he planned to kill every Dutch 
man, woman and child, "for the greater glory of God." The 
renegade, the traitor, the informer is invariably present to thwart 
reforms. Men are more apt to combine for mutual profit, regard- 
less of injury to others, than for self-protection. When it becomes 
profitable to rob the robbers, then spring up the robbers of the 
robbers. In America the organizing faculty is not with the peo- 
ple, but with the politicians. As a survival from monarchy days, 
the people expect the natural rulers to take charge of everything ; 
hence we have a special ruling class from the slums, and a sub- 
missive, groveling ruled. The people do not know their rights 
nor how to assert them ; the politicians study how to run the 
complex mechinery of government and scheme to make the people 
puppets. 

The guilds beginning with the Xorman conquest united trade 
interests, finally expanding to take in town government often. 
The chamber of commerce is the successor of the guilds. The 
Hansa towns, meaning corporation, during the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries, comprised 60 to 80 cities of Germany, strong 
enough to resist powerful monarchies, but kings and popes tried 
to destroy them. 

About 1600 a little book appeared anonymously in Germany, 
entitled "The Discovery of the Honorable Order of the Rosy 
Cross," from which came the term Rosicrucians. It contained 
dialogues between seven sages of Greece as to the best method of 
general reform in those evil times. Seneca suggests a secret 
confederacy of wise philosophers who shall labor everywhere in 
unison for this desirable end, and the idea is adopted. Their sole 
aim is to diminish the fearful sum of human suffering, to spread 
education and advance learning, science, enlightenment and love. 

Quacks reaped a harvest by perversions of this work of An- 
drea, the author. Imposters pretended to belong to the frater- 
nity, and found a readier sale for their nostrums. Andrea had 
great trouble in trying to undo what scoundrels had built upon 



576 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

his good work. The word Rosicrucian came to mean all sorts of 
occult humbug. 

The Utopia of Sir Thomas More was a fiction of high orig- 
inality which caused discussion and thoughtfulness concerning 
social organization. The Republic of Plato no doubt furnished 
More with the germ of his perfect society. Swift was indebted to 
More for many of his ideas. If false and impracticable theories 
are found in Utopia, says Hallam, this is in a much greater degree 
true of the Platonic Republic, and they are more than compensated 
by the sense of justice and humanity that pervades it and his bold 
censures on the vices of power. These are remarkable in a cour- 
tier of Henry VIII, but in the first year of Nero the voice of 
Seneca was heard without resentment. 

Kirkup holds that the state has the right to correct inequality 
of wealth by taking from those who have and giving to those who 
have not. This would immediately paralyze all commerce and 
result in starvation of every one, the lazy and dishonest would 
receive the results of industry and thrift. Lavelye spoke of 
greater equality in social states, Von Scheel defined socialism as 
the economic philosophy of the suffering classes. Collectivism 
denotes managing all affairs in a collective way. 23 In 1720 to 
1800 trades unions began in England, and Rousseau, Mably, Mo- 
relly and Baboeuf in France suggested social schemes. The lat- 
ter, in 1796, projected an insurrection, and its leaders were exe- 
cuted. In 1773 Ann Lee, the Shaker founder, said a revelation 
from heaven instructed her to go to America. She preached and 
performed cures and the Shakers claimed equal 'honors with Christ 
for her after her death in 1874. They were celibates and com- 
munists. 

Robt. Owen, 1800- 1824, experimented as a philanthropist at 
New Lanark, and demonstrated the correctness of his methods, 
while he was at their head, and benefited 2,500 unpromising peo- 
ple thoroughly. The English church and state condemned him 
and defeated his plans. He was a good man crushed by ignor- 
ance and rapacity in high places. 

A community at New Harmony, Pennsylvania, was started by 

23 T. D. Woolsey, Communism and Socialism, pp. 1 to 8. 



sociology. 577 

George Rapp in 1S05, moved to Posey County, Indiana, and sold 
out to Robert Owen in 1824 for his New Lanark community. 
There arc but few members, and the property is worth two mil- 
lion dollars or more.- 4 They sold, rented and gave away the 
houses and lands and returned to individualism. 25 In 1816 began 
English co-operative movements. Count Henri de Saint-Simon 
was the founder of French socialism in 181 7. His ideas were 
vague but to the effect that industrial chiefs should control society 
and science direct religion. In 1832 began Fourierism, in which 
association is the central idea eating and cooking in common, but 
private property was not abolished. The scheme finally failed 
by 1847. Proudhon, 1839, held that property was robbery and 
founded the individualistic and communistic anarchism of the 
present day ; he advocates "mutualism" in his last work. The 
anarchist would banish all rule and have perfect liberty, such as 
beasts enjoy, to eat one another. Anarchists prefer marriage, not 
for life, but during convenience; the average unrestrained an- 
thropoid would turn his wife and children an the streets when 
tired of them. The individualists would destroy all government 
with fire and murder and laborers are to fake everything, then 
organize themselves. 26 

In 1840 Louis Blanc advanced a scheme of co-operation with 
state aid. The French government permitted the plan in 1848, 
and all but 56 of the associations failed by 1875. The one remain- 
ing is that of the file cutters. 27 Icaria, in 1840, was a romance by 
Cabet, leading to communism, a remnant of which is in Adams 
County, Iowa, existing in a modest, slender way. 28 In 1841 
Brook Farm was started at West Roxbury, near Boston, re- 
modeled on the Fourier plan, and in 1847 failed and sold 
out. In 1843 the Ebenezer and Amana communities were 
founded on "inspiration," and they are said to thrive. Karl Marx 
advanced his theory of capital and his socialistic influence is very 
great. As to the collectivist creed Marx looks upon history as 

24 C. Nordhoff, Communistic Societies of the U. S., pp. 63, 91. 

"J. H. Noyes, History of American Socialism, Ch. IV. 

20 H. L. Osgood, Scientific Anarchism, Pol. Sci. Quar., Mch., 1889. 

27 Laveleye, The Socialism of Today. 

88 A. Shaw, Icaria, Iowa. 



578 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ruled by material interest and sees in the development of economic 
production a conflict of classes. He thinks capital is stolen from 
the laborers. Profit sharing experiments have been most numer- 
ous in France and America. In 1848 the Oneida (New York) 
Community was founded by J. H. Noyes, who advocated a com- 
munity of goods, wives and children. He had crude notions of 
improving the stock by what he called sterpiculture, resulting in 
feeble-mindedness and the failure of the community. Co-opera- 
tive movements in Germany extending from 1848 numbered in 
1884 one and a half million members, and succeeded in many 
ways. 

In 1859 the social palace of Guise was begun by M. Godin on a 
profit-sharing plan. The stove foundry began in 1840 with twen- 
ty members, now has fourteen hundred at Guise, and three hun- 
dred in Belgium. It is an organization for mutual help. 

Nihilism began in Russia in the year i860, through a few 
young men studying Hegel. They wish to destroy every form 
of government. In 1862 the Internationals of Europe began to 
plan emancipation by the workers themselves. They failed in a 
few years. In 1866 the Granger, or Farmers' movement, arose, with 
three-fourths of a million members, gradually lessening since 
1875. Harris, a bigot, started a religious Brocton community in 
1867 on Lake Erie, which broke up in 1875. In 1869 the Knights 
of Labor started, in 1872 the Internationals of America, which 
were terminated by the Chicago riots of 1886. In 1880 Henry 
George suggested the confiscation of rent, and originated the sin- 
gle tax movement. In 1883 the state socialist measures were 
started by the German government, with the sickness insurance 
law of 1883, accident insurance in 1884, an old age insurance in 
1889. New trade unionism developed in 1887, and in the next 
year Bellamy's book and the materialist movement appeared, end- 
ing in smoke. In 1894 the American Railway Union arose and the 
great Pullman strike followed, with the Coxey tramp march upon 
Washington. 

Speculative communism began in B. C. 600. Plato favored it, 
and in his "Republic," Socrates not only advised goods but wives 
in common. Maybe he wanted Xantippe to be generally appre- 
ciated. Socialism, communism or collectivism, has regard to the 



SOCIOLOGY. 579 

common weal. As used by the French and Germans, collectivism 
means industries managed in the collective way instead of sepa- 
rately and by individuals. 

In most cases these communistic schemes have been enthusi- 
astically advanced by men with one idea, ignorant but honest, and 
really feeling that they were inspired, or had fathomed the se- 
crets of the universe. It is notable that religion binds people to- 
gether more closely through substituting hopes of reward in an- 
other life, making them submit to inconveniences here more read- 
ily, and finally habit may make them adjusted to the communistic 
life, however silly or peculiar it may be. Of course there are 
numerous advantages mixed with the most foolish of these 
schemes. The Rugby colony in Tennessee was too good to last. 
Several Mexican projects have waxed and waned, often ending 
in one man owning all the property and making the rest w r ork for 
him. The Overcomers of Jerusalem started in Chicago, termi- 
nated in a female bossing a lot of swindled converts whom she 
now works as slaves. A treasurer of the scheme remained in 
Chicago with wealth enough to console him for absence from the 
holy land. Dowie has a Zion in Illinois, and a notable kingdom 
of about the same sort existed on an island in Lake Michigan in 
early days ; the people becoming bandits, were driven out by ad- 
joining citizens. The quakers and shakers are the most thrifty 
and harmless of such gatherings, but they are gradually passing 
away as sects. Such organizers as succeed in accomplishing 
great changes apparently for the better, seldom if ever leave prog- 
eny equal to them, as in the case of Charlemagne, Cromwell and 
others. The industrial communities such as Sir Titus Salt 
founded do great good and are filled with happy, contented people. 
Probably some of the various profit-sharing enterprizes are the 
most practical and productive. Marshall Field of Chicago is said 
to be one of the most just business men in the world. He gives 
fair salaries and has numerous partners in his various departments 
who have been promoted for efficiency. Those who have an in- 
terest in working with you are more to be deoended upon to ad- 
vance the general business than dissatisfied employes. The vari- 
ous communistic schemes have in some cases done away with 
family life, others have antagonized governments and been pre- 



580 THE EVOLUTION OE MAN AND HIS MIND. 

mature, or the head of the affair ran afoul of ancient vested inter- 
ests and was suppressed, as was Robert Owen ; many schemes 
have thrived through the energy and strong individuality of those 
at the head, to die with them because their guidance was lacking. 
Most of the plans have contained childish business or scientific 
ideas, and some 2 like that of Louis Blanc, might succeed in part 
and be adapted to one particular sort of business and not to others. 
A few, as in Germany, succeed, though their founders may per- 
ish in want, as did Schulze, who impoverished himself to carry 
out his co-operative movement. He believed in self-help rather 
than state help. His society of a million and a half members has 
a reserve fund of three hundred million marks. The vast major- 
ity of these movements, particularly in America, gradually dwin- 
dle, as the occasion for their starting passes. Enthusiasm dies 
out, or some fool or rogue gets at the management. No infallible 
system has been yet described. Like everything else in the uni- 
verse, natural selection and survival of the fittest will determine 
whether a scheme of the sort will succeed or not, and as much 
depends upon unforeseen conditions, chance obstacles or favoring 
influences, prospects seem discouraging, though patient study of 
the history of previous schemes and the reasons for their success 
or failure, together with due regard for old animal-human nature, 
offer more encouragement to philanthropists. Bellamy's ideal 
people were not of this w T orld; they were too good to be true. 
What would happen to them if one of our peanut politicians lived 
among them ? 

Animals generally educate their young, apes and birds espe- 
ciallv. Among those who educate themselves are cats, who learn 
by experience to pay no attention to their reflection in a looking- 
glass. Huxley observes that education begins with birth and 
that we would know little indeed if all we knew was what we got 
from the schools. One has to learn how to cross a street with- 
out being run over. As for schools, it is not the love of learning 
that fills them ; it is the advantage to be derived from mastering 
some subject, or, rather, to secure the diploma or certificate, 
whether mastered or not, or because compelled to become schooled 
against desire. Carlyle says, "the true university of these days is 
a collection of books." Physical force was requisite to the teacher 



SOCIOLOGY. 581 

of the early part of the last century, and survives in sonic places 

today. 

Education helps us to unlearn, to tear down old reflexes, and 
to dissociate what has been integrated in the brain. It often is 
as difficult as ripping up anatomical structures, and this is exactly 
what education does, or often tries to do, but fails because age or 
ignorance makes such structures too secure. 

Education also builds up reflexes in a brain, leading to expert- 
ness and facility of working, or, as Ruskin observed, "The mo- 
ment a man can really do his work he becomes speechless about 
it." The French divide students into auditaires and visuaires, or 
those who learn by hearing or visual impressions, and it is a fair 
division. Lawyers may be observed who can prepare a case from 
study of books, mainly ; others prefer to hear evidence and think 
the case over in auditory terms. In court, in the trial of a case, 
a suggestion to a visuaire is best made in writing, an auditaire pre- 
fers to hear the expert's suggestions. "What is learned in youth 
may become more vivid with age, so the usefulness of life may be 
increased by teaching children scientific matters such as chemistry, 
physics and biology, for they will impart a logic obtainable in no 
other way. Old methods have served their time, a technical skilled 
training which enables a living to be secured should be first and 
foremost ; the ornamental, according to Spencer, may be added 
later. Huxley's suggestions for education 29 favor lectures, dem- 
onstrations and examinations, and he makes the valuable observa- 
tion that "the better a lecture is as an oration the poorer it is as 
instruction." 

Education of the young occurred in ancient Egypt according 
to rank ; priests taught their children writing, astronomy and 
mathematics. Moses was thus educated. The ancient Chaldeans 
were literary. China had universities in remote ages. Persia, 
Judea and Greece taught their children. Scholasticism was rife 
in the later Roman empire and consisted in chatter about chatter. 
That theology is the only philosophy is a survival from such days. 
Charlemagne and King Alfred were eager to extend learning. 
The latter is said to have founded Oxford, but there is no proof 

20 Lay Sermons, p. no. 



5S2 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

of the existence of that college till a hundred years later. The 
University of Paris was founded in the twelfth century. The 
cathedral and conventual schools created or restored by Charle- 
magne, became the means of preserving that small portion of 
learning which continued to exist. They nourished most, having 
had time to produce their fruits, under his successors, Louis the 
Debonair, Lothaire and Charles the Bald. Rabelais managed, 
under the guise of humorous indecency, to spread some ideas 
among the priest-ridden populace, of the extent of their swine-like 
submission to tyranny, A. D. 1552. The treatise on Causes, of 
Giordano Bruno, a sort of pantheism, led to his being burned at 
the stake in 1600. The essays of Montaigne in 1580 make an 
epoch in literature through their influence upon opinions in 
Europe. He popularized many forms of thought previously con- 
fined to a few. 

As early as the sixth century, when France and Italy had 
sunk into deeper ignorance, the Irish monasteries stood in a very 
respectable position with regard to learning. 30 The influence of 
the church upon learning was partly favorable and partly the 
reverse. The venerable Bede compiled the literature extant in his 
time early in the eighth century. A desire for knowledge increased. 
The tenth century was darker in Italy and England than in France 
and Germany, though ignorance abounded in Europe generally. 

The progress of learning, however, was not to be a march 
through a submissive country. Ignorance, which had much to 
lose and was proud as well as rich, ignorance in high places, which 
is always incurable, because it never seeks for a cure, set itself 
sullenly and stubbornly against the new teachers. In place of 
the silly books in favor, philology and real science were threat- 
ened. "Through all the palaces of Ignorance went forth a cry 
of terror at the coming light." One man above all the rest, Eras- 
mus, cut them to pieces with irony and invective. They stood in 
the way of his noble zeal for the restoration of letters. Erasmus 
was soon in a state of war with the monks and in 15 18 inveighed 
against them in notes to his New Testament. 31 

30 Eichhorn, Vol. II, p. 176. 

31 Hallam, Literature in Europe, Vol. IV. 



SOCIOLOGY. 583 

The Jesuits established their first school in 1540 in Valencia 
under Francis Borgia, and this was the commencement of that 
vast influence they were speedily to acquire by the control of edu- 
cation. They began about the same time to scatter their mission- 
aries over the East. Men saw in the Jesuits courage and self-de- 
votion, learning and politeness, qualities the want of which had 
been the disgrace of monastic fraternities. The dangers of their 
system were yet still too remote to excite popular alarm. 

Fenelon was the pioneer in 1688 32 concerning the matter of 
female education, and this was the cause of his becoming pre- 
ceptor to the grandchildren of Louis XIV. He noted that a child 
learns much before he speaks, so that the cultivation of his moral 
qualities cannot begin too soon. He complains of the severity of 
parents and deprecates the use of punishment for children. He 
advises the use of the pleasanter aspects of religious instruction. 
He is indulgent, his method is a labor of love, a desire to render 
children happy for the time, as well as afterward, and "he may 
perhaps be considered the founder of that school which has en- 
deavored to dissipate the terrors and dry the tears of childhood. 33 

"I have seen," says Fenelon, "many children who have learned 
to read in play ; we have only to read entertaining stories to them 
out of a book, and insensibly teach them the letters ; they will 
soon desire to go for themselves to the source of their amuse- 
ment." 

He thinks that the natural, just ways of thinking of children 
should be encouraged instead of warped as they are by contact 
with the blunders, ignorance and malevolence of the world. He, 
however, does not favorably regard teaching science to females. 

Rousseau, in 1762, attempted reformation of education in his 
pedagogic romance "Emile," which created a great scandal, and 
the Bishop of Paris aimed an encyclical letter of twenty-seven 
chapters at the book, and Rousseau had barely time to fly for his 
life. His book was burned by the executioner. Basedow, Pesta- 
lozzi and Frcebel were inspired in their labors by "Emile." 
Rousseau's idea was to unfold the powers of children in due pro- 

'" Sur L'Education des Filles. 
i lallam, op. cit. 



5S4 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

portion to their age, to teach observation, self-reliance and to rea- 
son, and to rely less upon "authority." The church saw danger 
in awakening reason. Pestalozzi, in 1798 to 1827, in Switzerland. 
said : "Nature develops all the human faculties by practice, and 
their growth depends on their exercise." "The circle of knowl- 
edge commences close around a man and thence extends concen- 
trically." "Force not" the faculties of children into the remote 
paths of knowledge until they have gained strength by exercise on 
things that are near them." "There is in nature an order and 
inarch of development. If you disturb or interfere with it you 
mar the peace and harmony of the mind. And this you do if 
before you have formed the mind by the progressive knowledge of 
the realities of life you fling it into the labyrinth of words and 
make them the basis of development." "Schools place words first 
and thus secure a deceitful appearance of success at the expense 
of natural and safe development." He sought the interest of his 
pupils in their lessons, and wrote the book "How Gertrude 
Teaches her Children." "Training is everything. The peach was 
once a bitter almond ; cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with 
a college education." 34 

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly 
planted in the human head if you can only begin to innoculate it 
with an air of great solemnity. For, as in the case of animals, 
so in that of man, training is successful only when you begin in 
early youth. 

"Noblemen and gentlemen are trained to hold nothing sacred 
but their word of honor, to maintain a zealous, rigid and un- 
shaken belief in the ridiculous code of chivalry, and if they are 
called upon to do so to seal their belief by dying for it, and seri- 
ously to regard a king as a being of a higher order. 

"Again our expressions of politeness, the compliments we 
make, in particular, the respectful attention we pay to ladies are 
a matter of training, as also our esteem for good birth, rank, titles 
and so on. Of the same character is the resentment we feel at any 
insult directed against us, and the measure of this resentment may 
be exactly determined by the nature of the insult. An English- 

3i Mark Twain. 



SOCIOLOGY . 5S5 

man, for instance, thinks it a deadly insult to be told that he is no 
gentleman, or still worse that he is a liar, a Frenchman has the 
same feeling if you call him a coward, and a German if you sax- 
he is stupid,* 8 

Generalizations arise from abstractions of particular observa- 
tions. So if we learn otherwise than through experience We get 
distorted notions. Schopenhauer speaks of experience as the nat- 
ural and teaching as the artificial means of learning. General 
ideas driven into memory before the special are learned cause you 
to see the world falsely. As when one travels late in life he finds 
all his preconceptions full of mistakes and it may be too late to 
correct them. This is why "common sense" is lacking in men of 
"education." Facts should be first acquired as nearly first hand 
as possible and generalizations formed from them later. Chil- 
dren should be compelled to understand every word they learn 
before being allowed to use it. Otherwise knowledge may be 
mere verbiage. Preconceptions are often so deep that a man will 
shut his eyes to facts and refuse to see what contradicts his false 
views obtained from others. At least the child should be taught 
to verify the facts taught. It would learn to measure things by its 
own standard rather than by another's and thus escape a thousand 
strange fancies and prejudices and not have to unlearn so much. 
So it often happens that the neglected waif has an advantage in 
not being falsely instructed but in having been enabled to see 
things for himself, and the incredulity and scorn of false notions 
he acquires comes from that. / 

Previous to Lamartine the style phraseology and language in 
France was moulded after certain models. Poetry and literary 
language w r as copied after the classics of Greece and Rome. Art 
was subservient to old methods and measurements notwithstand- 
ing the glaring falsifications of nature comparable to the conven- 
tional tracings of Egypt. Sculpture and painting was bound to 
certain silly methods such as giving human eyes to horses and 
making bodily parts equal to so many heads. Malebranche :, ' ; was 
an admirer of Descartes, though acknowledging no master. 

88 Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism. 
rr ' Recherche de la Verite, 1674. 



5S6 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

Error he held to be the source of all human misery, he had some 
ideas as to the relations of the fibres of the brain to thought, a 
connection between brain motions and the operations of the mind, 
crude as these ideas were they were in advance of the notions of 
his day. Pascal laid down geometrical rules for reasoning. 

"The intellectual standing of any civilized nation depends upon 
two things, the preservation in books, in memory and in works 
of art and industry of the ideas of ancient workers and thinkers 
and the mental activity of living thinkers and inventors whose 
work takes its start from this standpoint of stored up thought. 
Rob any community of all its basic ideas and it would quickly 
retrograde to a primitive condition of thought and organization 
from which it might need centuries to emerge." 37 

The dangerous consequences to religion and morality are 
urged in refutation of certain ideas. No matter if the ideas are 
true the lie must stand. The universe would fall to pieces if 
bound together with such bonds. Immoral means, Jesuitical 
means must be taken to establish puerile conceptions of so-called 
"right and wrong." 

Universities should give free instruction in all branches. 
There should be no charge for tuition. Chairs should be endowed 
and professors selected for their abilities. At present the build- 
ing is everything and any sort of a figure-head will answer for a 
teacher if he has the influence to secure the place. Moreover, the 
great donations to universities enable the wealthy to have a wide 
curriculum, while the cause of general education is only sec- 
ondarily and remotely and insufficiently helped by university ex- 
tension methods which seldom reach the parties most to be bene- 
fited. 

Vested interests crop up in shaping the teaching in schools. 
Occasionally an honest, well-informed professor will be admon- 
ished by his designing colleagues that his lectures hurt some spe- 
cial interest, and he should not continue on that line. Darwin, in 
his autobiography, says that at the University of Edinburgh he 
found the instruction in several branches incredibly dull, and con- 
siders his time at Cambridge as completely wasted, owing to the 

37 Morris, Man and His Ancestors, p. 87. 



SOCIOLOGY. 587 

conservative, legendary teaching that avoids harming the vested 
interests of ecclesiasts. 

Educating moral imbeciles gives them added power for evil. 
Increase of intelligence merely affords the honest and dishonest 
better means of asserting themselves. It does not, as history 
shows, create either more honesty or dishonesty, but in the clash 
between the two the rinding of the line of least resistance may 
end in degeneracy or adjusting to the assumption that "honesty 
is the best policy, " possibly ending in the habit of honesty being 
formed. 

Darwin thought that a powerful animal would not have been 
so liable to be social and to that very fact of our ancestry lacking 
in strength may be due the higher mentality of man, as he had 
to substitute craft for power. 

The social feeling is an extension of the parental or filial. 
Those individuals which took the greatest interest in society would 
best escape dangers while those who care least for their comrades 
and live solitary would perish in great numbers. So that mainly 
those who clung together would survive to create posterity like 
themselves, and only the few forms who were strong enough, like 
the lion, to live apart would similarly be permitted to live. 

Social interchange of ideas develops intellect and the solitary 
must suffer deterioration in the forming of a community. 

Transformations such as that of rapacious, selfish man into the 
altruistic, considerate and social man are paralleled by the feud be- 
tween cats and dogs transmitted from vast ages back common to 
the great families of felidae and canid?e, with rare examples here 
and there of individual cats and dogs tolerating each other or even 
becoming friends. 

The cave men of Europe have left evidences of their having 
been a filthy lot, too ignorant, indifferent and lazy to remove ac- 
cumulations from places where they lived. Much of this unclean 
animal nature survives in the Hindoos and even in the Spaniards. 
Under Spain everything offensive existed in Cuba, filth, fevers, 
murder, robbery, gambling, ecclesiasticism. When Havana was 
cleaned up by the Americans, under George Waring, Jr., whose 
valuable life was sacrificed in his work, yellow fever, malaria, 
smallpox, etc., disappeared. Murders ceased, robbery stopped, 



588 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND JUS MIND. 

and the Cubans did not recognize themselves, but the Cuban news- 
papers of 1902 complain of a sincere attempt of the Spaniards to 
revert to their former filthiness in many instances. 

It often, appears that many vile things are associated, such as 
strife, disease, etc., and that improvement in one direction often 
helps other matters to become better. Physical and moral cleanli- 
ness cohere often, and neighbors finding a better atmosphere are 
likely to imitate what is good. Filth breeds disease, neglected 
muck heaps bring flies, and they carry typhoid. Swamps afford 
mosquitoes and they spread malaria. So an ignorant, lazy com- 
munity is likely to be a sickly one. The cleaning up of Santiago 
and Havana dropped the death rate and almost abolished yellow 
fever. The Spaniards appear to have brought all sorts of diseases 
to America, such as smallpox, syphilis, yellow fever and even 
malaria, for the natives claim that such things were unknown 
previous to Cortez' invasion. 

In keeping with disease and cruelty among the Spaniards their 
ideas of "honor" are low. Two hundred Red Cross flags were hung 
out over ordinary houses in Santiago during the battle to keep the 
Americans from shooting into Spanish troops, while Spanish 
guerrillas fired on the American wounded even when the Red 
Cross flag was on the tent or ambulance. They stole the food from 
their citizens and sent them out of the city to be fed by the Ameri- 
can troops. Gen. Blanco, the governor-general of Cuba, appro- 
priated one hundred tons of Red Cross supplies sent bv America 
to the reconcentrados and used the goods for his soldiers. 

Spain cared nothing for its soldiers' lives. The officers robbed 
the privates of subsistence and then urged them to fight to the 
death. Officers never surrendered when they had food. 

The Spanish naval officers were too gentlemanly to submit to 
drill or instruction and depended on what they called "common 
sense" and "practical ideas." The ordinary sailors of the United 
States were schooled and trained in complicated theories combined 
with target and other practice and the world saw the result. 

The vast and sudden extension of the means of communicat- 
ing and influencing opinion which the discovery of printing af- 
forded did not long remain unnoticed. Few T have temper and com- 
prehensive views enough not to desire the prevention by force of 



SOCIOLOGY. 589 

that which they reckon detrimental to truth and right. "Hermo- 
laus Barbaras, in a letter to Merula, recommends that on account 
oi the many trifling publications which took men off from read- 
ing the best authors nothing should be printed without the appro- 
bation of competent judges." 38 The same old spirit of censorship 
we find at every hand and in all ages even down to the present. 

Books were burned by order of the university. 39 An incredible 
host of popular religious* tracts poured forth in Europe with the 
opposition of churches and governments seeking to stem this free- 
dom of a new means of thinking and speaking. Many were the 
attempts to tax, license and curtail book making. A bull of Alex- 
ander VI in 1 501 reciting that many pernicious books had been 
printed in various parts of the world and especially in Cologne, 
Mentz. Treves and Magdeburg, forbids all printers to publish any 
books without the license of the archbishops or their officials. 40 

England seems to have been nearly stationary in academical 
learning during the unpropitious reign of Henry VII. Italy was 
a century ahead of England in learning. In 1598 King Henry IV 
of France ate without forks in his palace. Spoons had been in- 
vented and knives were known, though for a couple of centuries 
the little pitchfork, fourchette, was used on special occasions and 
not as now used. 

The hands were more carefully washed in those days before 
and after meals. The change from fingers to forks began to be 
made about the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seven- 
teenth centuries and much ridicule was heaped upon the innova- 
tion as over-luxurious. After the seventeenth century the use of 
forks spread from the aristocracy to humble circles of society. Its 
form underwent change from two straight prongs to the conven- 
iently curved many-pronged fork of today. 41 

The steps from individual to national hunger appeasing are in 
the chase, the pastoral and farming life, seeking new fields be- 
cause of overcrowding and the emigrations causing predatory 
habits, battles being between families of the same tribe, then with 

■ Beckman. Ch. Ill, p. 98. 
' Chevillier, p. 302. 

"° Guden's Codex diplomaticus, Vol. IV. 
41 J. von Falke, Ueber Land und Meer, 



590 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

neighboring tribes, and these united to fight other tribes. The 
government developing from the family to the tribe and nation. 
Trade develops, capital enabling the spread of commerce and in- 
tercommunication uses at first rude boats and wagons, finally sail- 
ing and steam vessels and railways, telegraphs and ocean cables. 

A street without sidewalks in a large city would seem queer 
to-day. We are so accustomed to them that one who builds a 
house would not think of leaving its front without a sidewalk. 
We accept sidewalks as the usual thing without expecting to 
charge passengers for walking over them. But long ago a builder 
would have laughed to scorn the idea that he was in any way 
obliged to put down smooth surfaces for the rabble to walk over. 
At this extreme we have the sidewalk constructed as a habit, at 
the other extreme the bare idea of one was nonsense. 

Society sweeps its debris into tenements, alleys, jails, asylums, 
poorhouses and refuses to look at it, but surveying its cleaned 
streets and well-kept parks exclaims, ''How beautiful the world 
is and how it advances." 

The rich certainly need educating, for their distance from the 
poor puts them beyond sympathy for them, but if they can be in- 
duced to take interest in the remunerative modern methods of 
Mills in New York and Rowton of London in building model 
boarding houses for the poor they can pride themselves on their 
charity and make money at the same time, such a feeling as is 
pandered to by the giving of a charity ball. At first this improved 
tenement house plan was a charity, later it was ascertained to be 
a good investment and it was seen that decency and philanthropy 
would pay, when rightly managed. 

We prefer to imagine that our own particular way of living is 
the proper and only one. Among some Nubian Arabs three days 
out of four the woman must be chaste, the fourth she may do as 
she pleases. During some religious festivals the bonds of mar- 
riage are released by common consent. The Dogut Indian is 
jealous and will beat his wife for an impropriety, but will lend 
rier to a friend. Among the Eskimos a married person is husband 
or wife to all other married, but the single must remain such till 
married. Monogamy was the law among the ancient Romans 



SOCIOLOGY. 591 

and descended to us by this pagan custom being fused with Chris- 
tian observances. 

Pericles stood above the multitude. His successors wen 
obliged to adopt other methods to acquire influence ; they took ad- 
vantage not so much of the strong as the weak points in the char- 
acter of the citizen and obtained popularity by flattering their in- 
clinations and endeavoring to satisfy the cravings of their baser 
nature. The bravest men felt that the prospect of being called to 
account as to their campaigns by cowardly demagogues before a 
capricious multitude disturbed the straightforward joyousness of 
their activity and opposed obstacles to their successes. A dema- 
gogue then was simply an influential speaker of popular politics. 
Demosthenes was commonly distinguished as an orator, but Kleon 
is branded as a demagogue. 

In Russia it is dangerous to be charitable on a large scale ; 
the court fears education and lifting of the common people. The 
czar is really a mere figurehead, the nobles behind him are the re- 
fined brutes. It is interesting to trace the origin of their sleek, 
arrogant cruelty, such as the pretty buzzard or vulture displays. 

A story entitled "The Sowers" describes the treatment in store 
for any nobleman who dares to endeavor uplifting the laboring 
classes. 

When the Pennsylvania coal strike began the powerful, re- 
spectable mine owners cut off food from the miners' families ; at 
the same time the striking miners refused to flood the mines as 
they might easily have done by calling out the pump men. 

During the coal famine of 1903, caused by conspiracies be- 
tween railways, dealers and mine operators to keep coal scarce 
to enable high prices, the City of Chicago adopted a temporary 
plan of selling coal at cost to the poor. This precedent might jus- 
tify municipal control of all business whatsoever, but the dishon- 
esty of the people and officials would bar such possibilities. Or- 
ganizations to take foul advantage of such a system would at once 
arise. If systems can be arranged to prevent such dishonesty then 
the plan would succeed. 

Indicating how a nobility or privileged class may be created 
from the ranks, Gerald Griffin remarks that when the country was 



59^ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

deserted by its gentry, a general promotion of one grade took 
place among those who remained at home. The farmers became 
gentlemen and the laborers farmers, the former assuming, to- 
gether with the station and influence, the quick and honorable 
spirit, the love of pleasure and the feudal authority, which distin- 
guished their aristocratic achetypes, while the humbler classes 
looked up to them for advice and assistance with the same feeling 
of respect and dependence which they once entertained for the 
actual proprietors of the soil. 

, The socialistic idea of to every one according to his needs, 
has to contend against who would be the best judge of those needs. 
The individual himself knows best what he needs, so both judg- 
ment and honesty are presupposed where they are not ; and, needs 
being supplied, there is an end of effort. 

Lord Bacon wrote that "Men in their innovations should fol- 
low the example of Time, which innovateth greatly, but quietly 
and by degrees scarce to be perceived." There are cataclysms 
also which make great innovations and sometimes the quiet kind 
have been the cause of the other sort. For instance, old errors 
may innovate new social diseases quietly until the whole fabric is 
threatened unless a revolution comes. 

Macaulay 42 remarks that the circumstances which have the 
most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of man- 
ners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to 
wealth, from ignorance to knowledge, from ferocity to humanity,- 
these are the noiseless revolutions, not of armies, senates, treaties 
or recorded in archives. They are carried on in every school, 
church, behind ten thousand counters and at ten thousand firesides. 
Nations may be miserable amidst victories and prosperous amidst 
defeats. We read of the fall of wise ministers and of the rise of 
profligate favorites ; not a small proportion of good or evil is 
effected by a single statesman as compared to the good or evil of 
a great social system. 

Buckle claimed that reforms were often attempted prema- 
turely by well-meaning fools, and what might have taken place 

42 History Essays, Vo.. I. 



SOCIOLOGY. 



593 



naturally, evolved, worked out, has thus been set back many years. 
Narrow reform ideas have often impeded real reforms. 

Wealth has not accomplished everything in the world. Much 
has been done by penniless fanatics working upon the hopes and 
fears of the multitude. 

Ample funds do not guarantee advance in anything, for the 
money attracts greedy superficial pretenders and may become the 
means of opposing the aims for which the funds were appropri- 
ated. Rome has had gold poured in upon it so fast it could not be 
counted. What has been the result? The smaller, poorer col- 
leges do better work than the heavily endowed ones. A vast re- 
search fund will inevitably fall into the hands of strugglers for it 
rather than those who could use it to the best advantage. Those 
selected for aid in research will be such as have influence, and 
these will spend their time in arrogantly imposing crude ideas and 
fighting unofficial meritorious ones. Just as official science has 
proven to be a curse. Frank S. Billings, of Sharon, Mass., had 
his hog cholera investigations stolen by official biologists, and 
they abused him for making good his claims. 

Improvement and reform is more often an incident than an 
intended result of progress. Often the improvement is in spite 
of its originators' intentions. As when newspapers attack wrongs 
to seek gain for themselves and are as apt to attack the right for 
the same reason. 

A priesthood may be so exempt from corruption through fav- 
oring circumstances, such as coming under the control of an up- 
right bishop, as to have a majority of good, sincere, devout men, 
but we must admit that under unfavorable circumstances it is pos- 
sible for the majority to be bad, as where an unprincipled head of 
the priesthood gathers his own kind about him and opposes the 
conscientious. "To do good we must know how to do it, and, 
like everything else we can only know this through the medium 
of our own passions, our own judgment, our own ideas, which not 
infrequently are rather as correct as they are capable of being, 
than as they ought to be." 43 

By a rough estimate a billion and a half of people are at pres- 

Manzoni. op. cit., Ch. XXV. 



594 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

ent on the globe, of whom about 75 per cent live like beasts and 
only ten per cent are fairly civilized, with but one per cent living 
in anything like comfort and enlightenment, and all of them are 
contending with one another for existence to a greater or less 
extent. 

The utter absence of any kind of a government is common 
among Asiatics, a sort of survival of the solitary or family, patri- 
archal rule, where there has been failure to form tribes or where 
once formed has degenerated into the single family control again. 
Reclus (Asia, p. 222, Vol. 1) describes the Turkoman absence of 
government. Such people are practically but little better than 
apes, they may imbibe a few ideas from neighboring nations, but 
are unskilled, revengeful and simple, like American savages, or 
even lower, for these Indians have advanced to the forming of 
tribes. This is the blissful state to which anarchy seeks to hand 
us. But many of these anarchists are insane, as was Louis Lingg, 
who, condemned to death in Chicago for the Haymarket rioting, 
succeeded in killing himself before the time set for execution. 
Others of this belief are half-educated fanatics, some of whom 
mean well but are misdirected in their energies and ideas. The 
various leagues to protect commerce, such as the Rhine and Hans- 
eatic, or for mutual defense, as in Greece, the kingly, free state, 
oligarchy, or republic when simplified mean shall one rule, two or 
three, or shall certain parts of the populace rule, and who is to 
represent them. There is usually the greatest reluctance to let- 
ting everybody rule, even by representation. But even when 
everybody is supposed to be represented it means that nobody is 
represented but the demagogue who steals the power. 

Some steps toward social advance may be seen in the oscilla- 
tions of the old-age pension legislation in various countries. In 
1896 a royal commission in England reported that old-age pen- 
sions were impracticable, and no very great effort has been made 
to make them otherwise. Half a million persons at an expense of 
three million pounds per annum is too vast a scheme, but there are 
ready billions for vice cheerfully. 

In 1899 an old-age pension act was added to the radical legis- 
lation of New Zealand and in New South Wales in 1900. 



sociology. 595 

Simultaneously with such humanity to the aged comes the 
statistical announcement that there is a lengthened average of 
human life. 44 

The initiative and referendum, by means of which the people 
may directly institute and ratify or disapprove of legislation and 
thus escape being misrepresented, has been long in use in Swit- 
zerland, and Larned gives its practical workings there to 1894 and 
1898. In Minnesota the referendum was brought into practical 
use in 1896 and this indicates a gradual but sure extension univer- 
sally of like measures of evolved socialism and better government. 
In 1898 the constitution of South Dakota was amended by the 
introduction of the initiative and referendum. In Chicago in 1891 
an overwhelming popular vote was cast in favor of the referen- 
dum and municipal ownership. 

Much advance in sociology lies in the perfection of mechanism, 
using the word perfection in a relative sense, as mechanism and its 
management requires a higher knowledge of nature. Mankind 
grows more skilled and thoughtful with all that is entailed by 
being compelled to study machinery based upon laws of physics 
and chemistry, for these latter laws must be to some extent under- 
stood by all who make their living by the use of machinery. A 
new classification of intelligence is dawning in the mechanical 
world which will be rated higher than the mere ownership of 
wealth which is already recognized as often associated with low 
mental qualities. Finally mechanical knowledge will create wealth 
and power. When it becomes necessary to have a certain amount 
of scientific information to secure a position that species of knowl- 
edge acts as a stimulant to intelligence, and soon we have a class 
that prides itself on having that knowledge and being skilled in 
certain lines, and soon from the ranks of such classes step up 
advanced thinkers. Necessity impels some inventors to rack their 
brains for new and labor-saving apparatus. Necessity may evolve 
a means of protecting the inventor's rights to his invention. 

Old dwellers in New Orleans remember the abominable old 
volunteer fire engine company system conducted by thieves, row- 
dies, brawlers, and yet tolerated as better than nothing. It gave 

44 Larned History, Vol. VI, p. 342, for details of advances. 



59^ THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

way to the present mechanical steam engine after much opposi- 
tion and bloodshed. 

Ultimately all kinds of refuse will be bought from houses. 
Now it is thrown out and enables politicians to collect pay for 
pretending to cart it away. In New York the privilege of sorting 
garbage was sold and nets the city an income. People are likely, 
when well enough organized, to make money out of what they 
now throw away, as coal tar products are made from gashouse 
refuse. 

From the heterogeneous to the homogeneous in all things 
promises a social system to grow out of the multitude of attempts 
and failures and partial successes in sociological co-operation. No 
one can foresee how 7 or when they may be united any more than 
the savage Teutons foresaw their feudal system, or realized that 
it would grow by the grabs of grabbers into "national unity and 
that there would be a world-uniting commerce on the basis of ad- 
justment of mutual grabs, becoming more refined, from open 
piracy to courteous swindling in trade. The rules of the game set 
for the time must be observed and new methods of swindling sup- 
plant the old, which custom has outgrown. An old speculating 
trip for a sailing vessel in trade was an "adventure," and losses 
were as apt to be made as gains ; finally trade developed in settled 
ways and routes and a greater assurance of profits followed. 

There were misgivings as to what would be the effect of con- 
stitutional provisions for militia and federal arsenals, but these 
fears proved to be unfounded. Contingencies cannot always be 
foreseen in regard to what does and what does not menace liberty. 
But it is thoroughly agreed that large standing armies destroy 
liberty, and it is asserted that large navies do not. They, however, 
are liable to promote naval rings who seek to control soft places 
and oppose sirigle-hearted merit because envious of it. Positions 
obtainable by intrigue attract designing persons who, being wholly 
intent upon hanging on to a high salary, are not likely to possess 
other abilities, but are more than likely to venomously resent any 
patriot attracting deserved attention, because the intriguers are 
liable to suffer eclipse, so they band together to destroy whoever 
has earned positions instead of securing them through influence. 

The warrior instinct is wonderfully deep in mankind and is 



MH'IOLOGV. 



597 



readily cultivated when needed, hence America does not need a 
large Standing arm} . Most men are soldiers bv nature and readily 
take to army training, as was shown in the civil war. During 
peace times football games afford excuses to kick one another 
to pieces. The military spirit born of savage instincts latent in 
all renders civilization skin deep. The people without a large 
standing army conserves its strength by favoring productiveness. 
A standing army eats the vitals of natural growth, and is ripe for 
the coup d'etat that develops Boulangers and Marchands, whose 
fate has differed from Napoleon's simply because the French peo- 
ple have grown a little more enlightened. The isolation and in- 
dustrialism of America has saved it from the kind of demagogues 
who destroyed Greece and many a European government. 

The fight for good over evil is a hard one and all the more so 
from Huxley's standpoint that ''Ethical nature, though born of 
cosmical nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent." In 
plain w r ords, the desire to do good is a natural evolution from the 
selfish old past, and this inherent selfishness contends against 
every step taken to benefit the race directly. 

There are different kinds of good, and Spencer makes an elab- 
orate definition of its constituents, but, however originated, the 
desire to do good exists everywhere. The surest form is in the 
desire to do good to one's self, but after all that is the colonial 
good, the general benefit sought to the aggregation of units com- 
posing one's self, and the highest is the "secondary ego," which 
substitutes the general for the personal good. 

Methods and ideas differ infinitely and tw^o ideas may clash 
while each was intent upon its theory of how the good should be 
accomplished. It is further complicated by hypocrisy turning to 
account the secondary ego of others, selfishness profiting by gene- 
rosity. 

Spencer notes that "there has to be a continually changing 
compromise between force and right, during which force de- 
creases step by step as right increases step by step and during 
which every step brings some temporary evil along with its ulti- 
mate good." Buckle shows that the laws of morality may be 
unchanged for ages, but knowledge sets us free and gives us 
the genuine article. 



CHAPTER XIX. 
ANALOGY. 

A glance at such matters as heredity, habits, and general phy- 
siological functions suffices to discover the parallelisms, resem- 
blances, if not identities in modes of operation of living things, 
and as houses made of bricks have much of the brick properties as 
one made of wood is liable to burn, so nations behave as the indi- 
viduals composing them, for the most part allowing a certain por- 
tion of the body to control that assumes to be acting in the inter- 
ests of all parts, but it is not doing so any more than the sovereign 
cares for his people in reality. 

In other chapters we have passed from atoms to animais and 
plants, and in Natural Analogies 1 an extended argument is ven- 
tured to the effect that a social organism depends upon its tele- 
graph, railway, steamship, manufacturing and mercantile systems, 
each intent upon its own gain, but incidentally working together 
for the common benefit, just as the different organs of the body 
do. In a general way we may say that sociologically the mer- 
chants, bankers and brokers are intestines and do not eat up 
everything passing into their custody solely because they cannot 
do so. Common carriers may be blood vessels and lymphatics, 
laborers and soldiers the muscle cells. Rulers merely correlate the 
visceral workings, and so legislators, kings, etc., correspond to the 
sympathetic nervous system; the real rulers are those who influ- 
ence the community more than do the supposed rulers. 

Plato's model republic was founded upon vague correspond- 
ences between mental and social divisions, and Hobbe pictured 
the state as a monster Leviathan. Herbert Spencer used his vast 
biological knowledge to show close resemblances between the 
activities of society and that of cells. He holds that England 

1 American Naturalist, March, 1892. 

598 



ANALOGY. 599 

would correspond to a much lower vertebrate form than the 
human. 

There are parallels of congestion and anemia in trade. In- 
dustries may die for want of supply. The co-operation of cells 
and laborers is in the interest of the colony. If one cell or organ 
attempts overgrowth it is malignant and kills itself in the end by 
parasitic destruction like that of the dodder. The boodler poli- 
tician is a cancer in this sense. Some nations deliberately place 
an arrested development monstrosity, as a cruel imbecile, on their 
thrones. 

The social like the individual organism is in constant danger 
of a part usurping functions greedily and destroying the entire 
colony in its selfishness. The fine brain is the highest and the 
weakest, the first to succumb to disease and last to be developed. 
So the highest good of a community is similarly difficult to foster 
and maintain. 

Metschnikoff likened inflammation to a warfare between 
micro-organisms and leucocytes. The news of the arrival of an 
enemy is telegraphed to headquarters by the vaso-motor nerves 
and the blood vessels are used as an avenue of communication 
W4th the threatened region. When the invaders are established 
they live on the host and scatter injurious substances which 
they form. The active leucocytes attack and try to eat the 
micro-organisms, and some may die in the fight and form pus and 
an abscess. Defeat of the leucocytes means sickness or death, 
victory means recovery. In our bodies there is a standing army 
of movable cells quickly concentrated to attack any foreign foe 
which may appear. 

Agrippa Menenius, B. C. 494, used the comparison of the 
organs of a body revolting against one another with resulting 
suffering to all to quiet a multitude on the point of outbreak. 

Max Miiller says this fable is of very great antiquity, and it 
is found among the Hindoos. 

It is not the volume but the activity of money that counts. 
It is the same with blood, anaemia compensated by quickened 
heart action. A parallel exists in lessened circulation, both causes 
increasing activity. Why? Hunger, the greater molecular at- 
traction, in the absence of surfeit. 



60O THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

From the fact that the brain uses up more blood than any 
other organ it may be inferred that when a social organism be- 
comes comparable to a monkey stage of development there may 
be more expended in thought than in gluttony. 

Blood vessel vaso-motors that regulate the blood supply are 
the telephones and telegraphs of mercantile life. In primitive 
animals the blood does not go always where it is wanted except 
by accident, just as the old sailing vessels went out on "adven- 
tures," and might meet with good exchange or bring their car- 
goes back. There was no directing apparatus, no means of com- 
munication to tell the congested or producing points where trade 
would be good, where articles were wanted. In higher forms 
the goods are swiftly transported on being telegraphed for, or 
where' regular demand has been instituted. A vaso-motor system 
acquaints the blood vessel with the nature of the demand, whether 
much or little is wanted, near or far. 

The separation of tribes by parting or by bloodshed and 
grouping about a new chief is comparable to the amoeboid split- 
ting and the new nucleus formation ; also there is a resemblance 
to parturition by disruption, with suffering and loss of blood. 

Tramps may be likened to wandering leucocytes that are 
wounded and imperfect, and there may be organs for them such 
as the spleen in which they are colonized and renovated. 

Dr. Daniel G. Brinton is quoted as treating the nation as an 
organism like the human body, and discussed such diseases as 
render it incapable of self-preservation. "That according to his- 
tory the average life of a nation was from 800 to 1,000 years, its 
disintegration for the most part being due to moral disease, as 
corrupt government, or priesthood, though nations do not fail 
from psychologic cause." The etiology of the diseases of nations 
he thought due to imperfect nutrition, poisons, mental coma, and 
sexual aberrations, each one of which received due consideration 
from the speaker; reviewing the causation factors in the health 
and welfare of this country, Dr. Brinton believes that our mode 
of life, use of stimulants and drugs might have some tendency 
toward mental coma. 

Buckle, in addition to noting that we expect men to be gov- 
erned in their acts by the state of the society in which they occur, 



ANALOGS . 

Bays that the entire moral conduct is likewise routinized. Not- 
withstanding the many incentives the crime of murder occurs 
with as much regularity as the tides and seasons. Quetelet notes 

that yearly the same number of murders occur and similar in- 
struments are employed in the murder. The same number and 
kinds of crime were yearly committed in France between 1826 
and 1844, and presumably since, in proportion to the population. 
Suicide statistics indicate that in a given state of society a certain 
number of persons must put an end to their own existence. Even 
the average of marriages in England bear a definite relation to 
the price of breadstuffs and van- with the average earnings of 
the masses. Memory defects appear to be capable of prediction, 
for yearly the same number of letters are mailed without direc- 
tion. 

Blackstone dates the time of memory for England from the 
reign of Richard I, as we date that of individuals about the fifth 
year. The first race consciousness could be located in India and 
Persia, for thence came the earliest records we possess. 

Hume says : "All our reasonings concerning matters of fact 
are founded on a species of analogy which leads us to expect from 
any cause the same events which we have observed to result from 
similar causes." 

Spencer 2 speaks of society as an organism made up upon lines 
comparable to those of the parts of an animal. Hobbes rudely 
likened nations and mankind to a Leviathan with his crude at- 
tempts to describe the functions and parts of his analogy, but 
there was not sufficient knowledge of biology in his times to 
enable him to see what would have surprised him in the correct- 
ness of his general idea and the faultiness of his use of it. The 
wandering amoeba may be likened to the nomad, the synamceba 
to the family, the aggregation of cells from a mother cell, differen- 
tiation gives in the gastrula forms a resemblance to tribal control ; 
then come the nerves and sense organs comparable to telegraph 
lines and sentinels ; the blood vessels afford special routes for 
conveyance of nutrition, as better roads through countries. Spen- 
cer thinks that even the highest nation is yet lower than the 

1 Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, p. 472. 



602 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

lowest vertebrate in comparing biological with governmental 
control. 

The law of distribution for valves in the veins I announced 
in 1881, in the American Naturalist, as alike for quadrupeds and 
man, showing that man was originally a four-footed animal, as, 
in common with other quadrupeds, when on his hands and feet 
his perpendicular veins are valved, and his horizontal veins are 
not valved. So this marked analogy is homology, identity, and 
Professor Frederick Starr and others mention it as a strong 
proof of evolution. 

Tissues work by stirs. A quiet leader is displaced by an 
active one, even though he may not be as good. People do not 
realize when they are well off. Change must occur to notify them 
of anything, change is necessary to feeling. Regularity, monot- 
ony, is practically death. Consciousness requires activity to a 
changed degree from the usual. The female is attracted by dif- 
ferences from the ordinary, as tissues demand a change. A stir 
is craved by the populace. Excitement, circuses, anything, rather 
than being bored with monotony. People are proud of those who 
make a stir. Within limits changes are needed to maintain life, 
but the lower the scale of existence there are extremes of either 
great routine or great changes. 

Overhead electric wires are replaced by underground ones, 
and gradually tunnels gather and group the different services. 
This closely resembles the evolution of the spinal cord, which 
gathers the nerves out of the way into more direct bundles pro- 
tected by the vertebrae, and the blood vessels replace the less 
definite method of nourishing the tissues as by lacunae instead of 
tubes in some of the invertebrates. Obsolescing organs are some- 
times converted to other uses, as when the swimming bladder be- 
comes a lung, and in tearing down wires they may be used for 
fences, or a telegraph line may be used for telephoning. 

A plant may be extravagant in flower production, its life is 
like that of the animal, a constant adjustment to surroundings. 
Plants like and dislike light or shade, swamps or deserts, heat or 
cold. Plants are colonies of vegetable cells, breathing, eating, 
growing, excreting ; the sap is the blood. Plants develop organs 
for defence or to assist its life struggle. The dodders are mur- 



ANALOGY. 603 

derers and robbers of other plants, living upon them and sapping 
their lives. Insectivorous plants may suffer from indigestion. 
Plants have diseases such as fungi, smut, ergot, rust, on potatoes, 
corn, lilies, rye, hops, wheat, grapes. Mimicry is resorted to by, 
some plants for protective purposes or to entice insects. Vege- 
tation is social or solitary, plants sleep and awake, are' parasites 
or mutualists, enter into partnership, co-operate and divide labor, 
are subject to the influence of heredity, habits and surrounding. 

Seed and pollen meet by chance. In higher animal life the 
deliberate union occurs. Adventure, chance, was the' early voy- 
age method for ships ; now there is planning of the destination 
with surer results. 

J. A. Thompson 3 describes the inter-relations of plants and 
animals, their dependence upon surroundings, the struggle for 
life, their armor and weapons, the cruelty of the struggle, their 
shifts for a living, insulation, concealment, parasitism, rapid 
change of color, protective resemblances, warning colors, mim- 
icry, masking, combination of advantageous qualities; their sur- 
render of parts to save themselves ; their social life, partnerships, 
co-operation and division of labor ; their gregarious life and com- 
bined action ; their domestic life, love of mates, love and care of 
offspring; their industries, hunting, shepherding, storing and 
making of homes. 

Trees of a special variety indicate soil of a certain kind, for 
instance, pines are found in rocky or gravel soil, beeches in a 
chalky soil, elms in rich, damp soil, oaks, ashes in heavy clay 
soil, willows and poplars in marshy soil ; just as certain animals 
thrive best under certain surroundings and the community of 
animals of all kinds with man is seen in man being liable to re* 
ceive from the lower animals, and to communicate to them, cer- 
tain diseases, as variola, the glanders, hydrophobia, etc. Man 
has internal and external parasites, as do other animals, and 
wounds are repaired by the same process of healing. 

Monkeys are born in almost as helpless a condition as our 
own infants, and often the young and adults differ as much. 
The Cebus azarse is liable to catarrh, monkeys suffer from apo- 

2 Study of Animal Life, 1896. 



604 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

plexy, inflammation of the bowels and cataract in the eve. The 
younger ones, in shedding their milk teeth, often died of fever. 
Many kinds of monkeys are fond of tea, coffee, liquors and to- 
bacco. 

C. J. Cornish 4 describes the beds of animals, their sleep, toi- 
lettes, society, dislike of solitude, etiquette, military tactics, cour- 
age, sense of humor, emotion of grief, their playing, pageants, 
industries, sicknesses, materia medica, migrations, etc. 

The physics of intensity decreasing as the square of distance 
or time, is seen in gratitude to the physician great at first, dis- 
appearing ordinarily with recovery, and a strong impression 
strengthening will power, sufficing to keep a drunkard sober till 
the influence passes, also in the fading of resolutions. 

• The adjustment of fibres to least resistant lines enables the 
easiest and best work to be secured by minds, by bodies, and by 
materials ; for instance, Stradivarius made his violins of old 
choir-stalls from an Italian church. It may be that with the rip- 
ening through ozone, etc., as wines do, and the added constant 
subjection to musical vibrations the wood of these box stalls ac- 
quired special resonance from the playing of string and wind in- 
struments, through the centuries, near the wood from which the 
violins were made. 

Animals are comparable to machines in converting vegetables 
into animal products of greater value, such as meat, milk, wool, 
muscular power from raw materials derived from the soil. 3 

Many mechanical principles are applicable to life, not only 
physically but mentally. Hoppe-Seyler's theory of albumen in a 
hydrated medium is equivalent to the need of water in joints, res- 
piration, the circulation and universally. 

The parallelogram of forces may be made to illustrate that 
will power consists in the resultant of impelling desires and im- 
pulses. Conduct can be analyzed mathematically if all the com- 
ponents are known. Action and reaction of mental states, emo- 
tions .and feelings are always equal and opposite, allowing also 
ior friction. When in a burst of emotionalism one throws his 

4 Animals at Work and Play, 1896. 

5 M. Miles, American Naturalist, July, 1894. 



ANALOGY, 605 

purse on a stage or altar he is apt to upbraid himself later. 

The correlation of vital and physical forces has been amply 
written upon by Joule, LeConte, Grove, and others. 

There is an incessant compromise everywhere in nature, the 
line of least resistance, the parallelogram of forces, the evolution 
of human conduct. "We do the best we can," remarked Principal 
Dawson pf McGill University to me when I asked him how he 
could oppose Darwinism with his able intellect. 

The hydrostatics and hydrodynamics of the circulation are ap- 
parent throughout physiolog} . The weak heart may stop beat- 
ing by lying on the right side, the anaemic person suffers from 
headaches, bad eye sight and confusion of thoughts when stand- 
ing up, but the reclining position relieves these states. 

When you live long in one place and speak of another town 
in which you formerly resided you will find yourself, upon going 
to a third location, speaking the name of the first when you mean 
to refer to the one you just left. The reason for this is brain 
inertia, the tendency to maintain the feeling of established rela- 
tions to locations. 

The duration of effects of stimuli is an evidence of inertia, 
varying with persons, and the reaction to stimuli also varies 
with persons. 

There are such things as the overcoming of inertia and the 
acceleration of momentum in human thought and in sociological 
projects, and the mind is subject to the laws which create inertia. 

Discontent, dissatisfaction, atomic tension, molecular insta- 
bility seeking other or higher combinations. The fading of 
friendship which in youth is supposed to be perpetual is like the 
nascent molecules and the worn-out compound ready to disinte- 
grate. 

Desire is continuous and insatiable because when an atomic 
combination is formed the new molecule has new affinities and 
seeks new combinations, so through life content is rare, and it 
is the rule for one want satisfied to be followed by even more 
imperative wants, as Daniel Drew stated, "the millionaire is 
never satisfied till he has half-a-million more." 

The two hydrogen atoms can be likened to the quantitative 
part of the union with oxygen, which is a qualitative atom in 



606 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HiS MIND. 

forming the water molecule. That is, hydrogen is simpler, and 
forms the bulk, while oxygen is more active, and these two ele- 
ments represent the germ and sperm cells, and the H.,0 formation 
resembles the fecundation. This likeness may be carried both 
ways to indicate the woman as a molecule for the infantile nour- 
ishment and the male as the more active and higher differentiated 
molecule, the union between which results in another application 
of Spencer's integration of the heterogeneous to form the homo- 
geneous ; if the derivation of oxygen primarily was from hydro- 
gen, by changed conditions of the latter, a more active atom 
was thus evolved. 

Nitrogen always tending to escape and oxygen always tend- 
ing to unite, constitute vital phenomena. 

Man is undeniably a chemical compound, an association of 
organic and inorganic molecules, and integrated into a complex 
which may be called also a molecule. His symmetry is analogous 
to that of crystals. 

Lester F. Ward 6 holds that chemical elements have evolved 
from simpler constituents in much the same manner as the inor- 
ganic compounds are formed. These latter form the continuation 
of a uniform process of evolution varied in its character only by 
the conditions of temperature affecting the globe at the period 
when these substances were respectively formed upon it, and the 
organic compounds are prolongation of this law under the greatly 
lowered temperatures of the earth's crust after its formation. The 
production of aggregates of higher orders of complexity through 
the recompounding of units of lower degrees of simplicity. 
Throughout the scale the molecules constituting each progres- 
sively prove complex unit, exhibit increase of mass, with decrease 
of stability. 

Helen C. De S. Abbott has an interesting paper on the com- 
parative chemistry of higher and lower plants, 7 wherein she takes 
the ground that as the evolutionary doctrine has shed so much 
light upon biology it will also enlighten us concerning the evolu- 
tion of chemicals into plants and other organic life. 

6 American Naturalist, Dec, 1882. 

7 American Naturalist, Aug. and Sept., 1887. 



ANALOGY. 607 

Felix Le Dantec, 8 in his resume et conclusions, says : 

To establish the parallelism between physiological and psy- 
chlogical activities we have unique points : That atoms have con- 
sciousness fixed and unchanged in a determined space. This con- 
sciousness continues through the molecules to the plastic sub- 
stances into the superior condition of the* nervous system. He 
derives from this the conclusion that psychic studies are useless 
that ignore these material conceptions, as they will not lead to 
the truth. 

Cells act as selfishly as their owners and the analogies of 
nature ally the egoism of man and animals to the chemical affini- 
ties upon which it depends. The cause of the selfishness of all 
animated nature lies in the chemical affinities from which, step by 
step, that selfishness was derived, and remains scarcely changed. 
The CHNO and other added atoms being together through their 
mutual grasp, and in this blind grasp of atoms they take from 
their surroundings that for which they have affinity. Cells mu- 
tually adhere for the same reason, and so do social organisms, 
civilized man, society and nations. 

One very common fallacy is that eventually man will live on 
concentrated chemical food when a glance at his make-up would 
show that millions of years would be required to produce a much 
less radical change in his feeding methods. The cooking of food 
makes his teeth imperfect and his digestion less hardy, but a great 
amount of debris is needed for intestinal activity, just as the 
chicken must have gravel. 

We have chemical ingesta in whisky, opium, morphine, etc., 
and it debases rather than nourishes, though it may temporarily 
act as a food. We have chemicals that are used as or with foods, 
but their effects are either undesirable or negative. 

Patent medicine gulpers are chemical eaters, and they do not 
thrive. 

Contemplating the meat eating, fruit eating and vegetable 
eating teeth and digestive apparatus of man, he is not likely to 
be anything but an omnivore for ages to come, possibly then he 
may eat less meat or none at all, but chemicals, never. 

s Lc Determinisme Biologique ct la Personality Conscicnte, Paris, 1897. 



60S THE EVOLUTION' OF MAN AND HIS MINI). 

There is no absolute. from which and to which we can refer 
everything. Things are lighter, warmer, farther than other 
things, but there is no gas so light, no heat so great, no distance 
so far but that there may be lighter, hotter, farther things con- 
ceived by the mind. . 

The earth stands still to us, but moves with reference to the 
sun, and while the sun is stationary to its planets both sun and 
planets move about a remote central sun. 

Trains side by side going at the same speed are stationary 
with relation to each other. If one passes the other the one 
passed relatively goes backward to the one that passes it. 

Up is dowm to opposite peoples on the globe, and both are 
relatively right and wrong at the same time in claiming to have 
their heads up. Any mode of life adjusted to any surroundings, 
any odors, however strong, any color of light, may become ac- 
cepted as the normal one. You may live in a grist mill, or near 
a boiler factory, and sleep quietly till the machinery stops. A 
countryman finds city noises intolerable, as the city man cannot 
endure the death-like quiet of the country. 

If you ascend an inclined plane the houses seem out of per- 
pendicular. A false perspective is created by architects in some 
small churches in Italy to give the appearance of the choir being 
far off by shortening the pillars at the end of the church. The 
Parthenon and St. Peter's are constructed with regard to relative 
parts and distances to produce perspective effects. 

We judge by comparisons, a relative matter. Heights are rel- 
ative to the eye. Something must be a means of measurement, 
and to enable any idea of sizes in a picture something must be 
introduced to enable relative comparison to be made, a man or 
animal, otherwise a hill might appear like a mountain or a lake 
like a small pond. 

Getting "turned around" is due to failure to notice the turns 
in your voyage, and regarding the relation of the two places the 
starting point and destination with reference to an error in your 
course. 

Purgatory is mentioned as paradise to those in hell, and hell 
to those in paradise. 



ANALOGY. 609 

When little things annoy us it is because there are no big 
things to bother us. When a real calamity occurs it obliterates 
the little annoyances. 

A man with a vast income in California drowned himself when 
his losses reduced him to the necessity of living on $50,000 a 
year. A tramp would be overjoyed to find a ten-dollar bill*. A 
long litigation resulted in $30,000 being given to a plaintiff with 
heart disease who expired from the excitement. Reaction from 
excitement can produce apathy. The refugees from Martinique 
who escaped the Pelee volcano and lost their families were so 
dazed that they spoke to the people of Fort de France as though 
the eruption and its effects were indifferent matters. 

A great fuss was made over the loss of the first American in 
the war with Spain, and later the news of hundreds dying in 
Cuba and the Philippines attracted little general attention. 

Hippocrates said a severe pain would dull the lesser pain. 
Martyrs in their ecstasy have appeared to be insensible to torture. 

Morality seems relative, for a mother will lie to save her son's 
credit, and one deceives to befriend a loved one. Some million- 
aire socialists have advanced ideas, but the size of their wealth 
influences their sociological notions. A millionaire spoke before 
a Xew York legislative committee about taxing such men as Van- 
derbilt out of existence. Another who had ten million dollars 
thought that sum w r as moderate, but all over that amount was 
wrong, and that Vanderbilt should be hung for retaining so 
much. 

Wundt brought Weber's or Fechner's law of the increase of 
stimulus required to produce sensation under the head of rela- 
tivity, as instancing that our sensibility is of differences and is 
not absolute. 

We regard a room as darker than it is on coming into it from 
the light, and emerging from the darkness a strong light may 
blind for a while, as too much suddenly presented knowledge 
may bewilder. Feeling is so relative that our sorrows lessen if 
we find greater sufferers than ourselves unless sympathy is 
blunted. Over-stimulation of the senses may cause subsequent 
disgust. Disciplining desires prolongs comfort. 

Armored animals were many in ancient geological periods, 



6lO THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

such as ganiods and the armadillo. Men abandoned armor when 
speed and skill made it useless. Skilled smaller unprotected ani- 
mals killed oft" the armored knights of animal life. 

When Chicago was a small place of 300,000 there was a char- 
acter to it which it lost in its subsequent two million of popula- 
tion. Boston, with half a million, preserved much of its original 
thinking ability, but its expansion threatens to make it as mush-* 
roomy, heartless and commercial as Chicago. These places may 
pass through the assimilating stages as Europe did in the middle 
ages and emerge with something resembling a sociological brain. 

Till a time is ripe events may not occur. In chemistry certain 
molecular arrangements are possible only when a definite group- 
ing of atoms has been reached. So with the spermatozoon de- 
pending upon the ripening of the ovum. The child cannot think 
like the man. And the masses have to be brought to a point of 
development before ideas for their welfare are possible with them. 

Low organisms whose few cells were nearly alike in function 
may be compared to a savage tribe. The barbarous or absolute 
monarchy, the oligarchy or boss rule of America is equivalent to 
a majority of the cells having no nervous system contact. An 
ideal republic would be such form as had all its cells in touch 
with its brain, wdiich while it rules the body should get its power 
to do so from the body. No government is a republic till it has 
the initiative and referendum. 

The centralizing steps are inevitable ; in an ascending scale of 
animal life we find the lower centers constantly passing under 
control of the higher to more intelligently correlate the body. 
Trusts are thus evolutionary outcomes, however much misery 
they may create at first ; they centralize for their own greedy 
ends, but the independent organs now become controlled in the 
interests of their master. 

When in a certain line of reptiles a tail drops off, as with 
the frog, then higher development is unusual, but the tailed 
batrachia may go on developing. That is, when a people become 
civilized the next step seems to be degeneracy. As the Cossacks 
have all the potencies for future development and are really no- 
mads, metaphorically they are still tailed, and may grow into the 



ANALOGS - 6l I 

future high race. The death rate for various reasons increases 
fa>ter than the birth rate with civilization, mainly due to preven- 
tion oi increase, so that the future nations are to come from the 
progeny of the neglected lower classes of today who are prolific 
enough to promise to inherit the earth hereafter, and in turn they 
will be overcivilized, decay and be supplemented by others whom 
they will look down upon socially. 

Spencer's instability of the homogeneous and reintegration of 
the heterogeneous predicts the settlement of Africa, China and 
South America by the various Aryan branches, as German, 
French. English, Russian, forming new nations "in endless dis- 
integrations and reintegrations." 



CHAPTER XX. 
CONCLUSION. 

The preceding chapters have been arranged with regard to 
the modern pedagogic principle that the logical grouping is not 
usually the best one for ready comprehension of a subject. Fur- 
ther, it was kept in view that all knowledge is relative, that a 
person may be well versed in one special branch and be wofully 
ignorant in other respects. It is impossible to cover all fields of 
learning, though the bane of many philosophical writings is an 
air of arrogant assumption. And even though one after another 
many fields may be traversed we cannot avoid growing rusty in 
details though much generalizing power may remain. 

Max Muller 1 suggests that where academic co-operation is 
impossible the next best thing is that a scholar eminent in his own 
department, and who knows what sound learning means, should 
for once step boldly out of his own domain, and take an inde- 
pendent survey of the preserves of his neighbors. There is, no 
doubt, considerable risk to the bold adventurer. He is sure to 
be called an interloper, an ignoramus, a mere dilettante ; but 
whatever accidents he meets with himself, the subject is sure to be 
benefited. It has often been said that a traveler who spends a few 
days in a country observes things which never strike the residents, 
and it is quite intelligible that a man who once knows what it is 
to know anything thoroughly, should in surveying a new field see 
things which from being too familiar, have failed to arouse the 
attention of the ordinary student. 

We have glanced at the contracting earth thrusting mountain 
ranges as wrinkles in its surface above a hot sea, and at the ap- 
pearance of plant and animal life changing, developing or retro- 
grading, availing of favoring circumstances to survive or through 
unfavorable conditions perishing. The laws of survival or degen- 

1 Prehistoric Antiquities of the Indo-Europeans, Cosmopolis, Sept. 1896. 

612 



CONCLUSION. 613 

eracy being applicable to all living things, whether plant, ani- 
mal or man. We have visited in imagination the ranges where 
separate groups of men-like apes and speechless ape-like men 
have evolved from lower quadrupedal forms. We can conceive 
of the high Pamir plateaux surrounded by glacier peaks afford- 
ing climatic and other conditions favorable to a superior Asiatic 
race the Aryans who, with the Semites, similarly originated to the 
South in the Persian Highlands spread over and dominated the 
earth and all other races. A pure race can hardly be said to 
exist with the facilities for mixture in all ages, whether historic 
or prehistoric. The preponderance of evidence being that in the 
north of Europe and Asia the Aryans have a Semitic strain, 
while to the south the Semites have been more or less mixed w r ith 
Aryans. Races, such as the Egyptians, did not preserve enough 
of the Aryan or Semite inheritance to survive as races ; they have 
reverted like the yellow dog to jackal ancestry. 

The middle ages in Europe teach us how man in some cases 
struggled up out of bestial ignorance and slavery, against the 
opposition of his own kind who profited by herding their fellows 
as swine or sheep. We see in Russia today this abject submis- 
sion of herds of animal men and in Turkey the sultan's anxiety to 
keep his subjects in total ignorance. In Europe the same old clutch 
upon brains and purses has been practiced by church and state, 
with here and there hysterical attempts at freedom. America 
probably has achieved the highest point of intellectual emanci- 
pation, but the same old greed, hypocrisy and cunning is at work 
trying to stem the current of advance, trying to degrade public 
service, public instruction, not merely through malevolence and 
mistaken zeal but because there is money to be made by organ- 
izing to rob and enslave, and no money to be made but much to 
be lost by opposing cruelty and oppression. Vested interests are 
sure to be encountered where brutalities are antagonized. Preach- 
ers "cannot afford" to denounce the modern piracy among the 
merchants of their congregation. They are safer among the plat- 
itudes they are paid to preach. Reforms, if they come at all, 
must come naturally, and through differentiation and develop- 
ment of intellect usually bent upon gain. The thief has to pay so 



614 THE EVOLUTION OF MAN AND HIS MIND. 

much for police protection that he concludes to become honest, 
as it no longer pays to be otherwise, and he finds that the time 
has arrived when "honesty is the best policy." And much of the 
real advance of the world, commercially, especially, has been 
along just such lines. Habit and heredity finally establish types 
and in the artizan and other classes we find characters who are 
organically upright, as far as their intelligence permits. But 
dissolution, or the falling away of superstructural circumstances, 
reveal whether this uprightness is solidly based or not. Changed 
conditions constantly surprise us by what they strip away from 
character. 

Since there is evolution at all it is a common supposition that 
all things evolve ; that is grow better, improve. The facts are that 
few things comparatively are temporarily exempt from retro- 
grade development. The bulk of mankind is still savage, ignor- 
ant and, of course, superstitious. Even in so-called civilized so- 
ciety, the clothing and customs with an imitative ability, such 
as the chimpanzee has when he uses knife and fork, con- 
stitute the covering of savagery. A war, a pestilence, con- 
flagration, politics, being placed in charge of the sick in- 
sane and paupers with the public funds for their care deter- 
mine how much of the brute and how much of the higher type 
of man there may be present. And when an unsophisticated but 
honest reformer appeals to the public heart and conscience to make 
things better and is laughed at by this same public, which really 
enjoys the discomfiture of the fool for being a Don Quixote, he 
then comes to realize that maybe he was born too soon. Balzac's 
father pointed to the crucifix as the fate of reformers. Even 
though doctrines, such as are accredited to Buddha, Christ and 
Mohammed may be accepted, they become perverted in time by 
the money getters, the priestly exploiters, and the Greek church in 
Russia is not alone in this perversion. 

As to a coming social revolution that will make all men broth- 
ers, the race is altogether too heterogeneous to admit of more than 
a few attaining the highest intellectual development that such an 
ideal state would imply. And it is likely that these few will be 
scattered, as they always have been, among the masses, their la- 



CONCLUSION. 615 

bors unappreciated when alive, but remaining more or less ef- 
fective after their deaths. All to what end? Quien sabe! The 
philosopher watches the game as a spectator, and regrets that he 
is forced to participate in it. lie dares to think and to express 
his thoughts, but must keep out of the way of those who try to 
kill off reason with the clubs of assertion and authority in the 
interests of enslavers of body and mind. 












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